Rackspace has transferred all the OpenStack code, trademarks and related intellectual properties to the OpenStack Foundation, leaving the cloud computing platform into the hands of the community.
As promised a year ago, Rackspace has entrusted the control of the OpenStack cloud computing software over to the OpenStack Foundation created for this very purpose. The foundation has grown to 850 organizations and 5,600 individual members from 88 countries. The initiative is backed by a number of major companies in the software industry including IBM, HP, Red Hat, Intel, Cisco, Dell, VMware, Yahoo!, Ubuntu, SUSE, and others.
The foundation is run by 24 directors, elected or appointed, but only 2 come from Rackspace. A Technical Committee of 13 elected members (1 from Rackspace) leads the daily decision regarding various projects within OpenStack. Over 550 developers have written over half a million lines of code over time. This is better than a year ago when a few dozens of developers from 8 companies used to submit code.
Having donated all the trademarks and intellectual properties over to the foundation, it can be said that OpenStack is truly out of Rackspace’s hands and control, free to evolve as the community decides.
OpenStack currently contains a number of projects that go through an incubation process meant to assure their compliance to the platform’s standards:
- OpenStack Compute (code-name Nova)
- OpenStack Networking (Quantum)
- OpenStack Object Storage (Swift)
- OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder)
- OpenStack Identity (Keystone)
- OpenStack Image Service (Glance)
- OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon)
- Metering (Ceilometer) – not yet accepted in incubation
- Basic Cloud Orchestration & Service Definition (Heat) - not yet accepted in incubation
The OpenStack roadmap mentions a new release by the end of September, 2012, including Deployment Improvements, Dashboard Updates, Security Enhancements, and splitting Networking and Block Storage projects from Compute. A new design summit is to take place in October, followed by another release next April.
In the meantime, Citrix, which bought Cloud.com, the developer of CloudStack, back in 2011, has entrusted their cloud platform to Apache, currently being under incubation. CloudStack has a goal similar to OpenStack’s – providing open source software to run IaaS clouds. According to their website, CloudStack is currently used by Alcatel, BT, Nokia, Contegix, Rightscale, Intel, and other companies to build their own private clouds, but the project’s contributor page mentions about 40 people. It remains to see if CloudStack will get up to speed and match OpenStack in features and development pace.
