Cloud Computing: OpenStack gets real

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The OpenStack Foundation is official as of Wednesday with a new 24-person board, $10 million in funding, 5,600 members, and a mandate to promote flexible open-source cloud infrastructure. Question: Will the foundation echo the success of Eclipse or the failure of OpenOffice?

After a sometimes contentious incubation period, the OpenStack Foundation is now official, with a new 24-member board chaired by SUSE exec and Linux Foundation director Alan Clark; 5,600 members; and $10 million in backer’s funding. Rackspace’s Jonathan Bryce, who did a lot of the heavy lifting moving OpenStack along, is executive director. The news comes after a few weeks of dramatic back-and-forth discussion (surfacing on Twitter) about who should be voted in and how public that process should be…

There’s a lot riding on OpenStack, the open-source cloud project launched by Rackspace and NASA more than two years ago. The community is watching to see how the foundation will handle the sometimes competing interests of its members. The big question is whether this effort goes the way of the Eclipse Foundation, widely seen as a successful transition of technology from one company to a multi-party consortium. The other option would be for it to echo the OpenOffice effort backed by Sun Microsystems, then Oracle, which foundered…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack-gets-real-names-board/