OpenStack Foundation

From handing off OpenStack to the independent OpenStack Foundation to taking patent trolls on head-on, it’s been a big week here at Rackspace. Here are some of the highlights of the week, in case you missed them.

Today is a huge day for the OpenStack community – Rackspace officially hands off the management of the project and all its assets to the independent OpenStack Foundation. We’ve planned for this day since Rackspace founded OpenStack with NASA just over two years ago, and it is a major milestone for OpenStack, the community and Rackspace.

OpenStack is 2 years old today. Time flies. In that short amount of time we’ve seen tremendous growth. OpenStack has become the most important open source project in the industry, and we’re proud to have founded and helped build a top-notch community that is fueling a true open source cloud operating system and an open cloud revolution.

Dallas! More than halfway home and back into the great state of Texas after stopovers in Los Angeles and Boulder. While the smallest of our meet-ups yet, that did not deter great conversation and plenty of great questions. With no representatives from the proposed OpenStack Foundation there was a bevy of questions about the Foundation itself, along with the current state of OpenStack, and discussion around the standardization of APIs. Our audience was a broad mix including students studying cloud computing for their dissertations and enterprise executives just wanting to get a taste of what OpenStack was all about.

When Rackspace made the decision to launch OpenStack, our top priority was to build a broad community of developers and users who were truly invested in its future.  We wanted to move it to a foundation as soon as we saw that the community was broad enough and strong enough to support such a move.  We initially expected that to be 2013 or later, but the massive explosion in contributors and users prompted us to accelerate the plan.  So in October 2011 we announced our intent to setup an independent foundation for OpenStack this year and with lots of participation and feedback from the community its launch is rapidly approaching.