Major Technology Companies Join OpenStack Foundation

OpenStack Foundation, home of the OpenStack cloud-based operating system, just announced the induction of 19 major technology and software corporations to its Platinum and Gold membership programs. Among the most prominent are Canonical, AT&T, HP, Red Hat, Rackspace, Cisco and Dell (News - Alert).

These new relationships mean enhanced technical and financial support for OpenStack, as well as more widespread availability of the platform. Each of these new members has been a regular contributor to the project since development of its most recent version started, and has shown very generous support along the way.

Free and open source (FOSS) software is always interesting once a decent-sized community of developers take interest; providing various add-ons and innovative technologies to enhance the experience of the software in their own personal way. OpenStack has made it a top priority to encourage developers to tinker with its software, as well as provide the best experience possible – for complete end-users and programmers alike. 

For the most part, FOSS tends to have massive support communities due to its free and constantly-evolving nature, which isn't always as simple as picking up the phone and calling tech-support, but can be much more helpful on a more technical level.

“In less than two years, we’ve had five software releases from hundreds of contributors from more than 50 companies, and the cloud operating system has grown from two core projects to five core projects across compute, storage and networking. The formation of a Foundation is about preserving and accelerating what's working and moving the community building activities to a neutral long-term home with a broad base of support,” said Jonathan Bryce of OpenStack's Project Policy board.

Through the Platinum and Gold membership programs, these leading software companies will be a part of a drafting committee, and also have equal say and control in the way of Bylaws for software as well as the publishing of drafts for community review.

Technology in general is moving closer towards full cloud integration every day, which is really making everyone's lives easier. Cloud computing takes the hassle out of tasks like accessing files on the go and file-sharing, among many other things - it's nice to see so many open source organizations getting involved in what could very well be the future of computing.

With so many premier technology corporations joining the OpenStack Foundation, cloud-based technologies are sure to see some major improvements and innovation over the next few years.