OpenStack Foundation: Protecting the Open Cloud Standard

Later today, Rackspace Chief Strategy Officer Lew Moorman is slated to take the stage at the OpenStack Conference in Boston to discuss next year’s formation of the OpenStack Foundation, a regulatory body that will take the reins for project governance and assume ownership of the trademark.

According to OpenStack’s blog entry, the Foundation is the next step in the platform’s maturation as the leading cloud computing standard. In the year-plus since launch, the OpenStack community grew from Rackspace, NASA and 20 other vendors to more than 110, including Dell, Citrix and HP — as regular TalkinCloud readers no doubt know.

And over the course of that year, OpenStack put out no less than four new feature releases thanks to important code contributions from across that community (though that release window is gradually getting wider now that the project has found its metaphorical balance). And now it’s time for OpenStack to take the step of formalizing its governance and develop a means of letting these community members guide the future of the platform.

To that end, OpenStack is going to be pooling feedback on how exactly the OpenStack Foundation can best serve, starting with a Town Hall meeting at the conference and continuing through the official launch in 2012. If you have an opinion but can’t make it to the OpenStack conference, you can e-mail them here.

We’ll be sure to come back with more details when Moorman announces them, so stay tuned to TalkinCloud for more insights into OpenStack’s strategy.