It's been a long time, but OpenStack The Foundation announced today that it will change its name to "Open Infrastructure Foundation", starting in 2021.
The announcement, which the foundation made at its virtual developer conference, isn't exactly a surprise. Over the past few years, the organization has begun adding new projects that went well beyond the core OpenStack project and has renamed its conference to the "Open Infrastructure Summit". The organization actually filed the "Open Infrastructure Foundation" brand in April.
After years of hype, the open source OpenStack project hit a bit of a wall in 2016, when the market started to consolidate. The project itself, which helps companies manage their private cloud, has found its niche in the telecommunications space and continues to thrive as one of the most active open source projects in the world. In fact, I regularly hear from OpenStack vendors that they are now posting record sales numbers, despite the lack of hype. With the stable project, however, the Foundation started rolling out a larger network and added additional projects such as the popular Kata Containers runtime and the CI / CD Zuul platform.
"We are officially transitioning and becoming the Open Infrastructure Foundation," Jonathan Bryce, long-term executive president of the OpenStack Foundation, told me. "This is something that I think is a fantastic step built on the success our community has generated both within projects like OpenStack, but also as a movement. [...], which is [about] how do you offer people choice and control as they build digital infrastructure? And this is, I think, a fantastic mission to have. And that's what we are acknowledging and recognizing and preparing for another decade to do it together with our large community. "
In many ways, it was more of a surprise that the organization waited so long. As Foundation COO Mark Collier told me, the team waited because they wanted to make sure it was working properly.
"We just wanted to make sure that everything we learned when we were building the OpenStack community and with the community - which started with a simple idea of 'open source should be part of the cloud, for infrastructure. That idea just spawned so. much more open source than we could have imagined. Obviously, OpenStack itself has become larger and more diverse than we could have imagined, "Collier said.
As part of today's announcement, the group also announced that its board of directors has approved four new members to its Platinum level, its highest membership level: Ant Group, the Alibaba affiliate behind Alipay, embedded systems specialist Wind River, China's FiberHome (previously a Gold member) and Facebook Connectivity. These companies will join the new foundation in January. To become a Platinum member, companies must contribute $ 350,000 annually to the foundation and have at least two full-time employees contributing to its projects.
"If you look at those companies that we have as Platinum members, it's a pretty broad set of organizations," Bryce noted. "AT&T, the largest carrier in the world. And then you also have an Ant company, which is the largest payment processor in the world and a massive financial services company in general - plus Ericsson, that does telco, Wind River, that does defense and production. And I think that says everyone needs infrastructure. If we build a community and successfully structure these communities to write software with the goal of bringing all that software into production, I think it creates so much value for so many people: for an ecosystem of vendors and for a large group of users and many developers love to work in open source because we work with smart people from all over the world. "
Existing members of the OpenStack Foundation are also on board, and Bryce and Collier have hinted at several new members joining soon but haven't made everything right for today's announcement.
We can probably expect the new foundation to start adding new projects next year, but it's worth noting that the OpenStack project continues apace. The latest of the semi-annual releases of the project, called "Victoria", was launched last week, with additional Kubernetes integrations, improved support for various accelerators, and more. Nothing will really change for the project now that the foundation is changing its name, although it may end up benefiting from a renewed and more diverse community building projects on its periphery.
