OpenStack Foundation

Description

"Community reaction has been mostly positive so far around today's upcoming announcement that Rackspace, apparently bowing to pressure from the same community, will form an OpenStack Foundation next year.

The OpenStack cloud hosting project has been getting pushed about creating a foundation for quite some time, even as it became a pretty popular open source project. But even with all the attributes that make open source developers happy--copyrights are kept by the contributors, the project is under the Apache Software License 2.0, and the project is governed by a board with eight out of twelve elected seats--a lot of people were still worried about the future of OpenStack, because all of the copyrights and trademarks are owned by OpenStack, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rackspace Hosting.

Initially, it was Rackspace that bore the brunt of suspicion regarding the health of OpenStack. This past spring, Rackspace was accused of unilaterally altering the parameters of the PPB by departing Rackspace employee Rick Clark. Clark argued in March that even though he believed that changes in OpenStack governance model were positive, the closed way in which they were enacted did little to show the community that at the end of the day, it was Rackspace asserting direct control over the OpenStack in the way they saw fit.

Currently Rackspace is governed by a twelve-person Project Policy Board (PPB), with four of the twelve board positions are appointed by Rackspace (and currently only two of those seats are held by Rackspace employees), and the other eight positions elected by the community at large.

Later, as people calmed down about Rackspace, there were still concerns that a larger, less open-source-friendly company could come along and acquire Rackspace and its assets, thus forever altering the OpenStack project.

Today's announcement is expected to formally come during the OpenStack design summit currently underway in Boston. It will represent a significant change in Rackspace's attitude about foundations." (http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/210737/openstack-foundation-horizon)