IBM, Red Hat help form OpenStack Foundation

OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service platform that has been adopted by the industry as the David to Amazon Web Service's proprietary Goliath, has signed up 19 major technology companies to steward the development of the technology.

The 19 initial supporters of the OpenStack Foundation were announced on Thursday. Initial 'Platinum' members include AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE, while the 'Gold' members are Cisco, ClearPath Networks, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo.

"In less than two years, we've had five software releases from hundreds of contributors from more than 50 companies, and the cloud operating system has grown from two core projects to five core projects across compute, storage and networking," Jonathan Bryce of the OpenStack Project Policy Board said in a statement. "The formation of a Foundation is about preserving and accelerating what's working and moving the community building activities to a neutral long-term home with a broad base of support."

OpenStack was launched in mid-2010 as an open-source code collaboration between NASA, Rackspace and over 20 other technology companies. Since then it has gained further contributors — its most recent release, named Essex, had code contributions from more than 50 companies.

Plans to form a foundation to assure the technology would be developed in an open way were announced in October. At the moment, OpenStack's development is overseen by the Project Policy Board, which has 15 members, eight of whom are from Rackspace.

Now the committee has been formed, the Platinum and Gold members will help write the bylaws which will be published for community review. The plan is to have a final draft for ratification by the Rackspace Board and OpenStack community by the third quarter of 2012.

Major companies have all supported or expended resources to develop the technology: HP has based its own cloud entirely on OpenStack, while Dell has developed 'Crowbar' open-source software to automate the installation of Hadoop onto Dell servers.