Red Hat and IBM have agreed to support the open source OpenStack Foundation, organisers behind the cloud infrastructure organisation have announced.
Both companies have agreed to join the foundation as platinum members, meaning they will contribute $500,000 (€384,000) a year for the next three years. The companies will also contribute code changes to the software stack as well.
In addition to these two companies, AT&T, Canonical, HP, Nebula, Rackspace and SUSE are also planning to sign on as platinum members to the foundation.
Last year, Rackspace, which has been overseeing the OpenStack development process, announced that it would spin off the OpenStack project as a stand-alone foundation. Since then, the project's managers and contributors have been working out the details of how the foundation would work.
The group expects to make more announcements about the foundation's progress next week at the OpenStack Spring Conference, being held in San Francisco.
With the legal help of the committed sponsors, the organisers behind the foundation will write a set of bylaws for the organisation, which then will be posted for community review. They expect to ratify the final draft by September.
A number of other companies have pledged their support as well at a lower level, including Cisco, ClearPath Networks, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo. This second tier, called the gold level, requires contributions between $50,000 (€38,000) and $200,000 (€154,000) a year, depending on company revenue.
IDG News Service