News

Why the structure of open-source foundations matters

Hewlett-Packard goes shopping, Intel and Rackspace join forces for the OpenStack Innovation Center and more in our weekly update.

July 30, 2015
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Here’s the news from the OpenStack world you won’t want to miss — the musings, polemics and questions posed by the larger community.
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In case you missed it

Open-source foundations are springing up faster than McMansions in the suburbs. This is the “Age of Foundations," so you’d better know what yours is built on, says the OpenStack Foundation’s own Thierry Carrez, in a clear-eyed analysis following the recent launch of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Carrez, release manager for the OpenStack project and chair of the OpenStack Technical Committee, says not all foundations are created equal, so make sure you understand the structure.

"Few of them actually let their open source project be completely run by their individual contributors, with elected leadership (one contributor = one vote, and anyone may contribute). That form of governance is the only one that ensures that a project is really open to individual contributors, and the only one that prevents forks due to contributors and project owners not having aligned goals," he writes on his blog."If you restrict leadership positions to appointed seats by corporate backers, you’ve created a closed pay-to-play collaboration, not an open collaboration ground. On the downstream side, not all of them accept individual members or give representation to smaller companies, beyond their founding members. Those details matter."

As usual, there’s a fair bit of moving and shaking in the OpenStack world this week.

Intel and Rackspace moved to create the OpenStack Innovation Center at Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. Trumpeted as a "center of excellence" in the joint press release, the goal is to "accelerate the development of enterprise capabilities and significantly add to the number of developers contributing to upstream OpenStack code." Barb Darrow over at Fortune is skeptical, wondering whether the center is "real cloud acceleration or a slow-motion ‘death by consortium.’" We’ll keep you posted…

On the shaking front, Hewlett-Packard snapped up Active State’s Stackato, a leading distribution of Cloud Foundry. The buy will keep the conversation about startups in the OpenStack world lively; ActiveState’s CEO Bart Copeland is “happy” and “overjoyed” at the acquisition.

"The growth of Cloud Foundry (including the formation of the Cloud Foundry Foundation), Docker, and OpenStack during the past few years has been staggering," he writes on his blog. "We feel that Stackato plus HP Helion is uniquely positioned to provide a powerful combination of these technologies to enterprises everywhere."

This ongoing landgrab could potentially be good for your next job search, if this chart of big companies making OpenStack hires is anything to go by…

In another major change this week, the big tent just got a lot more crowded — but easier to navigate. OpenStack bid adieu to the Stackforge label — which is how OpenStack-related projects consumed and made use of OpenStack project infrastructure.

In a move to make these projects easier to access and avoid the pain of transferring them over, the names of projects hosted in the OpenStack project infrastructure will no longer be distinguished between Stackforge and OpenStack.

Moving forward, the official retirement announcement says "all projects developed in the OpenStack infrastructure will now use the ("openstack") namespace. Although Stackforge namespace is officially retired, not all projects within the ("openstack") namespace will be official OpenStack projects."

If you’re looking to build a case for OpenStack in your organization, market researchers TechNavio published a recent report on global OpenStack enterprise adoption. Their crystal ball predicts a compound annual growth rate of 31.88 percent through 2019 and dubs OpenStack "one of the most viable solutions to meet the demand" for rapid deployment of processes.

Also looking forward, we want to see you at the OpenStack Summit Tokyo, whose record number of talk submissions is already foreshadowing a blockbuster. A friendly reminder: Applications for OpenStack’s travel support program, are due August 10. Here are some tips for getting a travel support grant and how to get started on your visa application (pro tip: start now!) if you need one…

https://twitter.com/pabelanger/status/626798596155813889

https://twitter.com/jjstevensjj/status/626786739605086208

https://twitter.com/AliciaVRuiz/status/626764753877209088

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