The OpenStack Foundation will continue its business as the Open Infrastructure Foundation – and instead of solely promoting OpenStack projects for creating clouds, the newly named group will look to support “the development and adoption of Open Infrastructure globally”.
More precisely, it will push its own assortment of software products, including lifecycle management tool Airship, container project Kata Containers, OpenStack, edge computing software StarlingX, and CI/CD platform Zuul. The foundation will continue to foster the OpenInfra Labs pilot project for better tool interoperability and a working group to advance edge computing.
While this reframing might be surprising to some, it’s another marker of a development that has been happening for a while. Alternative infrastructure initiatives haven’t made the foundation’s life easy in the last couple of years, companies like Suse have decided to take a step back from OpenStack to focus on other platforms, and the renaming of the foundation’s house conference into Open Infrastructure Summit (yes, that’s why it sounded familiar) last year already pointed towards a need to open up to stay relevant.
Open Infrastructure Foundation is backed by over 60 founding members, which include Ericsson, AT&T, Red Hat, Huawei, Facebook Connectivity, Intel, and VMware.
The news comes just days after OpenStack Victoria was released with better Kubernetes integration and additions for tackling complex networking issues.
While the Open Infrastructure Foundation is rebranding, things seem to look less rosy in the world of modular Java technologies. According to Dan Bandera, president of the Open Service Gateway Initiative Alliance, the 21-year-old OSGi “no longer has the critical mass necessary to continue as a stand-alone organization”, which is why it has decided to transfer its assets to the Eclipse Foundation.
“The OSGi Board of Directors has reached an agreement with the Eclipse Foundation to establish an Eclipse OSGi Working Group which will be the home for the continued evolution of the OSGi specifications. Current OSGi Alliance members and others that wish to participate will need to be members of the Eclipse Foundation itself, and also members of the Eclipse OSGi Working Group.”
Since the latter has yet to be formed, active members of the OSGi Alliance might have to wait a bit before things pick up. Other changes to be expected largely concern licensing, as Eclipse Foundation output “is expected” to use the organisation’s own license. The Eclipse Foundation was mainly chosen because of its large overlap in members and the “synergistic relationship” between the organisations.