Citrix becomes platinum Apache sponsor

The Apache Software Foundation has announced that Citrix has become its newest Platinum sponsor, joining Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! at the top level of membership. Platinum sponsorship of the Apache Foundation requires an annual $100,000 donation to help fund its work. At the same time, Citrix has also announced that it is relicensing its previously GPLv3 CloudStack platform under the Apache 2.0 Licence as version 3.0.1. The company is applying to have the project join the Apache Incubator programme as a first step in it becoming a full Apache project.

CloudStack was created by Cloud.com as an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) platform similar to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). A community edition of CloudStack was licensed under the GPL and a commercial version was initially offered by the company.

Citrix acquired the company in July 2011 and, in August 2011, announced it would be unifying the codebase, integrating it with OpenStack and releasing it all under the GPLv3. The move now to the Apache 2 Licence has been driven by community members who "for whatever reason are more apt to participate in an Apache-licensed project than a GPLv3 project". CloudStack works with the Xen, KVM, VMWare ESX/ESXi, Oracle VM and XCP hypervisors.

The Apache licensed CloudStack software is available from the project's GitHub repository; binaries are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS 6.2, 6.1, 6.0 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS from the download page on the CloudStack site, but are, at time of writing, only the GPL licensed 3.0.0 version.

(djwm)