Rackspace hands OpenStack over to independent foundation

Rackspace has announced that it is handing over the management and assets of the OpenStack project to the OpenStack Foundation. Members of the project had worked to set up the foundation since Rackspace's original announcement of it in October 2011 and, according to Rackspace, the course had been set since the very founding of the project.

Earlier in the year, NASA (the other founding member of the project) bowed out of active development of the software, expressing satisfaction that the community behind OpenStack had grown to such a degree that the development of the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform was in safe hands. Two months later, OpenStack celebrated both its second birthday and the fact that the project had attracted contributions from 180 companies, rivalling the Linux kernel in that respect.

The governance change had been expected to occur within 60 days of its first board meeting in August, which means the transfer to the OpenStack Foundation is well within the scheduled window. As an independent, non-profit organisation, the foundation will oversee the development of the project and provide funding for developer gatherings and project infrastructure, not unlike the Linux Foundation does for the Linux kernel. In the words of its Executive Director Jonathan Bryce: "The foundation provides an independent home that will be the long term way that OpenStack will continue to be developed and supported."

As an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, OpenStack makes both server and network infrastructure available virtualised "in the cloud". The latest version of the project is code-named Essex and was released in April. The source code for the project is licensed under the Apache license.

(fab)