When Rackspace and NASA started OpenStack -- a collection of open source tools for building Amazon-style clouds in any data center -- Rackspace shouldered the responsibility for organizing the community.
But as that community grew, it became clear that the project needed a more neutral steward, and the company started taking steps to hand the project over to the non-profit OpenStack Foundation.
On Wednesday, that transition was completed, as Rackspace handed over the OpenStack trademark, and the foundation officially took over governance of the project. From here on out, the OpenStack Foundation is responsible for all legal, financial, marketing and operational management issues.
Rackspace revealed that it would hand over control last October. The foundation was quickly incorporated, and since then the organization has secured more than $10 million in funding from its 5,600 individual members and over 190 participating companies. Major companies like HP, IBM, and Dell have a seat at the table, but no single corporate entity has control over the community.
The foundation board had its first meeting last month, where it elected Alan Clark, a director of standards and open source at SUSE, as its chairman, and Cisco VP and CTO of cloud Lew Tucker as vice chairman. On Wednesday, Rackspace announced that the old project policy board is transitioning to a new technical committee at the foundation. Also, a user committee has been created and will be led by Tim Bell, operating systems and infrastructure services group leader at CERN. The user committee will provide a voice to enterprise, academic, and service provider users within the foundation.
But the governance issues may only just be beginning. VMware, which offers a competing private cloud product called vCloud, recently joined the OpenStack Foundation.
While some welcomed VMware into the fold, not all observers were so sanguine. George Reese is the founder and CTO of enStratus, a company that makes tools for managing applications across cloud providers. enStratus was a founding member of OpenStack, but Reese says the company has declined to pay to join the OpenStack Foundation because of a need to remain neutral among cloud vendors. He has not been shy about voicing his criticism of VMware's membership in OpenStack.
"This is marketing gold to VMware," he says. "When it's in a competitive scenario, VMware can say: 'We're a member of OpenStack, and we don't think it's ready yet.' Before it was something a customer might dismiss, but now it's going to carry some credibility."
But in July, VMware acquired Nicira, a network virtualization company that was already deeply involved with OpenStack. Couldn't VMware's involvement with OpenStack be related to that acquisition? "I just don't see how the objectives of a small startup acquired by VMware trump the objectives of a large corporation that's been around for years," Reese says. "I sincerely hope I'm wrong. Maybe they're trying to restructure themselves to reflect a more open reality."
Meanwhile, Citrix, another founding member of OpenStack, has open sourced a competing cloud standard that it acquired from Cloud.com last year. Keeping everyone happy in an environment with conflicting interests will be a challenge. To say the least.
