OpenStack (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There are lot of questions about whether OpenStack Community can be truly vendor neutral. The OpenStack Foundation Board has three tiers (see my previous post questioning the neutrality of such a structure); Platinum Members, Gold Members and Individual Members. Platinum and Gold members have 2/3 of the votes in the board with Platinum Members enjoying a better percentage of influence per company than the Gold members. The hope is that the 1/3 of individual members will ensure that the project stays neutral without the influence of big corporate members. In other words, the hope is that the 1/3 occupy openstack-ers will negate any influence by the 2/3 corporate power and ensure that Marten Mickos’ Soviet Union comment doesn’t become true. If we look at the membership list, the hope gets dashed big time. The break up of the individual members are:
- Rackspace – 787
- HP – 753
- Unaffiliated/Others – 297
- Cisco – 41
- Canonical – 28
- Dreamhost – 24
- Red Hat – 22
- Nebula – 22
- CloudScaling – 17
- OpenStack Employee – 14
- Morphlabs – 13
- EMC – 13
- Dell – 13
- SUSE – 10
- Piston Cloud – 10
- Yahoo – 5
- IBM – 5
- AT&T – 5
- Tipit – 4
- OpsCode – 4
If we turn this in terms of percentage,
- Rackspace: 31.56%
- HP: 30.25%
- Affiliated with other companies: 25.24%
- Independent or not sharing affiliation: 12.95%
The above numbers were retrieved from the membership list OpenStack published recently based on the script given here. The numbers were obtained from the OpenStack Foundation mailing lists here and here.
I am still optimistic that OpenStack will succeed but I also see my role as someone who will keep the project honest. These numbers are published in that spirit while I also realize that anti OpenStack shenanigans, a term I reserve for folks whose professional careers depends on the failure of OpenStack project, will use these numbers to promote their agenda. In the coming years, I would expect the numbers to change with the influence of Rackspace and HP coming down and others going up. If not, I am sure Marten Mickos will appear prophetic.
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