An interesting new way for companies to fund open-source projects inside the Open Infra Foundation was announced today. Corporate members of open-source foundations usually pay a membership fee in order to support the organization. The OpenInfra foundation is launching a new model that will allow members to direct their funds to a project.
The OpenInfra Foundation's CEO and executive director said that the communities are well known for having strong technical governance and clear rules around how technical decisions are made Direct funding to a specific project was not available in some cases in the model.
It can create mixed incentives and a pay-for-play dynamic that the organization has tried to avoid. It made sense that there was a lot of interest in the community to support specific projects since the foundation is now home to a wider variety of projects but where not every member is heavily invested in every project.
The leadership of the foundation spent a lot of time thinking about how to marry the core principles of the foundation with the new model. The model tries to combine the best of the OpenStack/ OpenInfra technical governance model that has worked well over the last 10 years with financial considerations.
Every new project will have its own legal entity that will hold the funding. To make sure that the new projects are legit, an OpenInfra Platinum member has to serve as the sponsor for the projects and other organizations can join the project fund. Sponsor companies have to become OpenInfra members. The project fund governing board is made up of funding members who decide the fees for the budget. Community-building services will be delivered by the OpenInfra Foundation.
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“It’s not a new approach to how these projects get governed technically. That is actually what has worked super well for a really long time. It’s why new projects have wanted to come and work with our community and our foundation — because of all the trailblazing stuff that happened with OpenStack around technical governance,” OpenInfra COO Mark Collier noted. He added that there are a lot of companies that are looking to build bigger ecosystems around their open-source projects and accelerate adoption — and they are willing to put money behind that. But at the same time, both Collier and Bryce noted that the foundation has put a system in place that they believe will prevent the organization from accepting bad projects for the sake of revenue.
This new model only applies to new projects that join the foundation. There may be some existing projects where the organization can apply the new model retroactively, but for now that is not on the plan.
Airship for infrastructure lifecycle management, the StarlingX edge compute stack, and the Zuul CI/CD platform have all been added to the OpenInfra foundation.
The general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation said that the most important thing they have learned is that collaboration is key. The most successful open source projects are funded by multiple companies because they are able to combine their resources to achieve a better rate of return.
New projects and new members can be brought into the fold with the new model. The leadership team acknowledges that the models of managing open source projects may not be for every project. The number of open-source projects is only going up as the need for these sophisticated cloud infrastructure projects increases, all while they become more complex.
"W hen it comes down to it, there will be a lot of projects and that's why we have multiple foundations."
The new funding model is one of the things that the Foundation announced today.
Version 2.0 of Kata Containers, version 5.0 of Zuul and the launch of StarlingX 6.0 were released by the Foundation.
As we look to our next decade of open infrastructure, we are building momentum on what makes our model so successful: aligning companies and individuals who wish to work together, providing them with a framework and tools to effectively collaborate, and helping them
The OpenStack Foundation becomes the Open Infrastructure Foundation
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