On Friday, VMware, Intel and NEC were approved by the OpenStack Board of Directors as gold members of the OpenStack Foundation. Gold members of the Foundation provide the foundation with .025% of their company revenue, with a minimum contribution of $50,000 and a maximum contribution of $200,000. Based on their applications, VMware, Intel and NEC will contribute $66,666.67, $200,000 and $200,000 respectively to the OpenStack Foundation.
OpenStack’s governance structure permits of two levels of participation in the form of Gold and Platinum members. Platinum members contribute $500,000 annually and additionally commit to providing operational resources as well. Companies from both tiers are expected to contribute code to and support OpenStack’s development in an “open development process that is driven by technical meritocracy.”
The updated list of Gold and Platinum members now features a total of 22 organizations as follows:
•Platinum Members: AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE
•Gold members: Cloudscaling, ClearPath Networks, Cisco, Cloud Computing Association In Taiwan, Dell, DreamHost, Intel, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, NEC, Piston Cloud Computing, VMware, Yahoo
In a letter announcing the acceptance of VMware, Intel and NEC to the OpenStack board, Board Chairman Jonathon Bryce commented on factors considered by the board in approving their applications as follows:
Today, the OpenStack Board of Directors approved the applications of three companies wishing to become Gold Members: Intel, NEC and VMware.
The factors considered by the Board included a commitment to helping achieve the OpenStack Foundation Mission through demonstrated and potential contribution to the OpenStack community in terms of code, adoption into product roadmaps, adoption as an end user, geographic and industry diversity and community development efforts.
New Gold Members will be represented by the eight elected Gold Member directors currently serving on the Board.
We would like to welcome them to the Foundation, and look forward to their continued contributions to our community.
VMware’s application for a Gold member spot in the OpenStack Foundation was put on hold from late August, leading many commentators in the cloud blogosphere to speculate that VMware’s acceptance into the Foundation was delayed because its vCloud suite poses a competitive threat to OpenStack as a proprietary cloud platform. The reality is that the more support OpenStack receives from private vendors, even proprietary cloud vendors such as VMware, the better given that their support lends more credibility to the OpenStack brand and embodies the potential for collaboration between proprietary cloud platforms and the emerging incarnations of the OpenStack product. Moreover, VMware recently acquired virtual networking leader and OpenStack contributor Nicira. VMware also supports the open source Cloud Foundry PaaS project, which is likely to feature alongside OpenStack in hybrid cloud environments marked by a combination of IaaS and PaaS environments.
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