New Directed Funding model follows successful launch of OpenInfra Foundation, which has garnered a 33% increase in supporting organizations in the first year of operation.
BERLIN, June 7, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- OPENINFRA SUMMIT — The Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation) announced today that it has added the ability to directly fund specific projects and is "open for business" to those organizations who want to leverage that ability to build a sustainable community around an open source infrastructure project.
The announcement comes one year after the launch of the OpenInfra Foundation (formerly the OpenStack Foundation) with a new mission and scope of building open source communities who write infrastructure software that runs in production. Sixty organizations supported the launch of the new foundation in January of 2021. Since then, membership of sponsoring organizations at all levels has grown by more than 33%, and Silver Members now exceed 50. Ant Group, Bloomberg, FiberHome, Meta, Microsoft, Nipa Cloud, Vexxhost and Wind River have joined as OpenInfra Platinum or Gold Members within the last 18 months. The expanded mission has also enabled the OpenInfra Foundation to tap into new regions, garnering increased support from organizations in Africa and Southeast Asia.
"For ten years, we operated as the OpenStack Foundation to grow and nurture the OpenStack community, resulting in OpenStack becoming one of the most active open source projects to ever exist," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenInfra Foundation. "In January 2021, we launched the OpenInfra Foundation to take this successful, collaborative approach to open source and make it available to other infrastructure projects," continued Bryce. "Today, The OpenInfra Foundation's new Directed Funding model enables organizations to invest directly in the projects they care most about and receive project management support from the non-profit organization that has nurtured such successful open source projects as OpenStack, Kata Containers and StarlingX."
***Learn more about Directed Funding at the OpenInfra Foundation***
"It has been my privilege to be involved with Kata Containers from its very beginning—from when we announced the project in 2017, until today when we're deploying Kata Containers at Ant Group on a large scale to increase the efficiency of our workloads and reduce our CO2 emissions," said Xu Wang, senior staff engineer at Ant Group. "Five years in, I can attest to the critical role that the OpenInfra Foundation has played in nurturing the Kata Containers project and expanding its community of contributors and users. The OpenInfra Foundation model and The Four Opens approach has certainly worked for us, and I would encourage organizations that want to build a successful OpenInfra project to consider what the OpenInfra Foundation has to offer."
Community Collaboration and "The Four Opens"—A Model That Works
Guided by open collaboration principles known as The Four Opens, the global OpenInfra community excels in delivering open source infrastructure software that runs in production, as evidenced by the many users who are attending the OpenInfra Summit Berlin this week to share their use cases and practical experiences. Among the projects in the spotlight are:
- OpenStack: Launched in 2010 by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack, an open source cloud computing infrastructure software project, is one of the three most active open source projects in the world, with more than 8,000 contributing developers and 25 million cores in production. Among the thousands of OpenStack users are nine out of 10 of the world's top telecommunication companies. Approximately 450 organizations contribute to OpenStack code and funding, and the global market for OpenStack products and services now exceeds US$7.7 billion.
- Kata Containers: At its launch in 2017, Kata Containers—a software project providing secure, lightweight virtualized containers—was supported by three organizations: Hyper.sh (acquired by Ant Group), Intel and Huawei. Today, Kata Containers comprises a broad ecosystem of users and more than 60 contributing organizations. The project is supported by infrastructure donors which include Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS, IBM, openSUSE, Vexxhost, PackageCloud, and Packet.com.
- StarlingX: StarlingX—a complete cloud infrastructure software stack for the edge—was launched in 2018 with the support of Intel and Wind River. Today, the StarlingX community of supporters also includes Dell, HPE, Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia. Organizations around the world are using StarlingX in production for multi-access edge computing, industrial automation and IoT, universal customer premise equipment, virtual radio access networks, healthcare applications and more.
"The most important thing we've learned from each of these successful projects is that collaboration is key, and the more breadth in the ecosystem of support the better," said Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation. "In fact, we've found that the most successful open source projects are funded by multiple companies, because they are able to combine their resources to achieve a much stronger rate of return."
Delivering Value with OpenInfra Project Funds
The OpenInfra Foundation's Directed Funding approach offers project communities the opportunity to tap into:
- A global network of 110,000 individuals, 182 countries and 700+ organizations;
- A customizable approach to building successful, sustainable open infrastructure projects, based on The Four Opens and with services delivered by the OpenInfra Foundation staff;
- A legal, project-specific funding entity with a project fund governing board, comprising at least one OpenInfra Foundation Platinum Member sponsor joined by multiple funding partners. This entity is created in an efficient way, but is flexible enough to be modified based on the needs of the project community.
"We've taken what we've learned from OpenStack, Kata Containers and StarlingX and built a framework to establish new projects with a host of committed organizations, nurture those projects with sustainable resources, and guide them to deliver impact and returns for the entire ecosystem," added Carrez. "Our message today is that we have a model that works, and we're standing ready to help you with your infrastructure software project."
***Visit https://openinfra.dev/projects/hosting/ for more information***
Platinum Members of the OpenInfra Foundation include Ant Group, Ericsson, Facebook, FiberHome, Huawei, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent Cloud and Wind River. Gold Members of the OpenInfra Foundation now include 99Cloud Inc., Bloomberg, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cisco, Cleura, Deutsche Telekom, EasyStack, Intel, Jinan Inspur Data Technology Co. LTD, Mirantis, NEC, New H3C Technologies Co., Limited, Nipa Cloud, Troila Technology, Ubuntu, Vexxhost and ZTE Corporation.
About the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation)
The OpenInfra Foundation builds communities who write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. With the support of over 110,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container native apps, edge computing and data center clouds. Join the OpenInfra movement: http://www.openinfra.dev
Media Contact
Allison Price, OpenInfra Foundation, 5128278633, [email protected]
Jennifer Fowler, Cathey Communications, 8654056380, [email protected]
SOURCE OpenInfra Foundation
Share this article