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. 

Learn more about Directed Funding at the OpenInfra Foundation

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.

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.

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.