Red Hat and IBM sign on to OpenStack Foundation

OpenStack, the open source cloud software developing organisation, has announced that nineteen companies have signed a "Framework acknowledgement Letter" marking the start of the legal creation of an OpenStack Foundation. With the move to the foundation-based governance model, both Red Hat and IBM have now joined OpenStack and will be joining the Foundation as "Platinum" members.

Statistics from the most recent release of OpenStack, "Essex", showed that Red Hat has been a major contributor of code, despite not being a member of the organisation. Red Hat has now confirmed it is working on an enterprise distribution of OpenStack. Other "Platinum" members will be Linux vendors SUSE and Canonical, systems integrators HP and IBM, cloud service providers AT&T and Rackspace, and cloud platform developer Nebula, who are already "Participating Companies".

Signing on to the Foundation as Gold members will be Cisco, ClearPath, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo. OpenStack is now forming a Drafting Committee to turn the mission statements and framework outlined in the letter into drafts of the required legal documents for the approval of the participants. The current schedule does not give a date for the formation of the foundation, but drafting is expected to go on at least into July.

The OpenStack Foundation will be a replacement for the contentious governance of the organisation behind the cloud software stack, which was felt by some to be dominated by one of the project's original founders, Rackspace. OpenStack was created by NASA and RackSpace in July 2010 after being developed as an alternative to other open sourced cloud stacks. In October 2011, Rackspace announced that, after concerns about the project's management, it would begin the process of creating a foundation.

(djwm)