The long-awaited spinning off of OpenStack into its own non-profit organization has finally happened: The OpenStack Foundation has officially launched with more than 5,600 individual members from more than 800 different organizations.The new OpenStack Foundation will be responsible for guiding the community and development of the OpenStack platform going forward. This follows on last October’s announcement by Rackspace that it would spin off OpenStack into its own organization to protect the open cloud standard it was developing.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of OpenStack Foundation, spoke with Talkin’ Cloud just prior to the official launch of the organization about the creation of the foundation and what cloud providers can expect from the non-profit organization going forward. With plenty of strong cloud players subscribing to the OpenStack concept and helping to fund its development, it took a full year to go from idea to launch of OpenStack Foundation.
“The cloud market is very fast moving, and we had as one of our highest priorities not disrupting the momentum and progress of OpenStack, the ecosystem of companies and the developers who are writing the software,” Bryce said.
The OpenStack Foundation has received more than $10 million in funding from various companies involved, and it will have several full-time staff, a board of directors and three membership levels — Individual, Gold and Platinum.
The organization’s mission statement is to protect, promote and empower the OpenStack software and the community around it. Cloud is a multi-year play in the technology industry, so it makes sense to have a broad base of support and have a single company focused on the project to ensure its success, Bryce said.
“It also just makes people feel more comfortable with working with a particular project or community when they see it’s not tied to a single company and it’s not subject to the desires or whims of that particular company,” he added.
Rackspace has done a fine job growing the demand and support for OpenStack, but under its control, anything could happen. For instance, what if the company got acquired? Look at the concerns over what would happen to OpenOffice when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Spinning OpenStack off to be managed by a company dedicated to its promotion and further development will ensure it continues. And it will likely ensure greater success than under the control of a vendor.
“It’s a pretty big step forward for any project, and I think for OpenStack, it’s at the beginning of its next phase of development and progress,” Bryce said. “It’s positioning it like very few open source projects out there that are positioned in terms of resources, in terms of people, money, companies.”
Indeed, it is the beginning of the next phase of development. The next OpenStack release will come out next week.
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