For over a decade, the OpenStack Foundation oversaw the open-source OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Over time, the OpenStack umbrella covered more open-source projects. So, in October 2020, the Foundation transformed into a new organization: the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF). Now, it has announced its first board to help direct its members and their cloud-oriented open-source projects into the 2020s and beyond.
While a good deal smaller than the leading corporate open-source organization, The Linux Foundation, OIF has found a nice niche for itself in covering OpenStack-related open-source software. The OIF will continue to oversee OpenStack. But, with its 100-thousand community members, it will also help direct such cloud-friendly projects as Airship, Kata Containers, Magma, OpenInfra Labs, OpenStack, StarlingX, and Zuul.
The new group’s platinum members are Ant Group, AT&T, Ericsson, FiberHome, Huawei, Red Hat, Wind River, and Tencent. They are joined by Facebook, which just became a top-level member. Altogether the OIF has more than 60 corporate members.
The bulk of the organizational work will be done under the OIF’s 27-member board. Their numbers include Amar Padmanabhan, Facebook software engineer; Xu Wang; Ant Group senior staff engineer; and Daniel Becker, Red Hat’s senior director of engineering. Allison Randal, the well-known open-source strategist; and Perl Foundation leader, will serve as the board chair.
After her election, Randal said:
“Open infrastructure promotes ‘innovation and choice on the Internet,’ as Mozilla is fond of saying. The open-source nature of the projects hosted at the OpenInfra Foundation—as well as the projects with which we openly collaborate — create economic opportunity around the world. It is an important proof point that modern, open-source development can be funded by corporate interests but guided by the technical governance of individual contributors. I’m humbled by those who put their confidence in me to lead the board, and I’m energized by the opportunities before us to help define the next decade of open infrastructure.”
Mark Collier, the OIF’s COO, added:
“It’s exciting to see the open infrastructure movement grow at such a rapid pace, as evidenced by having more platinum members than we’ve ever had before, more OpenInfra community members encompassing infrastructure experts who operate some of the largest infrastructures in the world, like Ant Group and Facebook, and new open-source software being created like Magma. All of these trends point to the start of a decade of people and companies investing in open infrastructure that’s just getting started, and we want to invite everyone to join us as we build open source communities who write software that runs in production.”
