Open Infrastructure Foundation Seats Its First Board of Directors, Including Engineers from Ant Group, Facebook and Red Hat
AUSTIN, Texas — January 27, 2021 — The Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation) today announced that the Foundation Board of Directors has expanded to 27 individuals, including Amar Padmanabhan, software engineer at Facebook; Xu Wang, senior staff engineer at Ant Group; and Daniel Becker, senior director of engineering at Red Hat. The announcement was made as the OpenInfra Foundation convened its first board meeting under its new moniker, with representatives of 22 global technology organizations taking their seats as the first slate of board members. During the meeting, individual member of the Foundation Allison Randal was elected the board chair for the 2021 year.
Currently the OpenInfra Foundation comprises over 100,000 community members in over 187 countries and advances projects such as Airship, Kata Containers, Magma, OpenInfra Labs, OpenStack, StarlingX and Zuul.
“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 infrastructure in the world, like Ant Group and Facebook, and new open source software being created like Magma,” said Mark Collier, COO, OpenInfra Foundation. “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.”
OpenInfra Foundation Board of Directors, 2021
Facebook joins previously announced Platinum Members Ant Group, AT&T, Ericsson, FiberHome, Huawei, Red Hat, Wind River and Tencent. Support for the OpenInfra Foundation comes from more than 60 corporate members.
“We are excited to see collaborative efforts around open source projects like Magma take off as we join the Open Infrastructure Foundation today,” said Amar Padmanabhan, software engineer at Facebook. “We created Magma to give operators a true cloud-native distributed mobile packet core that is compact and easy to deploy, and we look forward to what the OpenInfra community can contribute to improve connectivity for people around the world.”
The 2021 Board of Directors, seated today, includes:
Individual Directors
- Tim Bell
- Kurt Garloff
- Julia Kreger
- Rico Lin
- Sean McGinnis
- Amy Marrich
- Mohammed Naser
- Allison Randal
- Shane Wang
Platinum Directors
- Daniel Becker
- Gang Chen
- Ruan He
- Paul Miller
- Amar Padmanabhan
- Chris Price
- Xudong Ren
- Ryan Van Wyk
- Xu Wang
Gold Directors
- Johan Christenson
- ChangBo Guo
- Clemens Hardewig
- Li Kai
- Arkady Kanevsky
- Tytus Kurek
- Grace Lian
- Junwei Liu
- Shannon McFarland
“Open infrastructure promotes ‘innovation and choice on the Internet,’ as Mozilla is fond of saying,” said Allison Randal, OpenInfra Foundation board chair and individual member of the Foundation. “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.”
Cloud&Heat, iVolve and SafeSpring also join the 60 organizations to support the OpenInfra mission of creating open source communities who write software that runs in production.
OpenInfra Community Approves Amended Bylaws Community members of the OpenInfra Foundation approved on January 15 bylaw amendments that remove the limits on the number of Platinum and Gold Members of the Foundation. The amended bylaws also allow for adjusting the total number of board members as needed in order to balance the number of Platinum, Gold, and Individual Members. Each Platinum Member organization appoints a representative to serve on the Board of Directors. Gold and Individual members are elected by the community at large.