OpenStack - is like the Soviet Union. Who develops OpenStack?

Last week, RackSpace has launched the open platform OpenStack in its cloud. And though HP has done the same a little earlier, but in HP Cloud OpenStack is running in beta mode, but in RackSpace Cloud - anyone already can start using OpenStack for business needs. So now all these debates what is more cool, Amazon Web Services or OpenStack will go into practical area. And the last theoretical debates took place shortly before the launch at the GiGaOm Structure conference. And at this conference, Chris Kemp, CEO of cloud provider Nebula (which, by the way, is OpenStack member) compared OpenStack with Soviet Union - "a collective farm ostensibly run for the good of its members, but where nothing is actually accomplished." Why Chris Kemp said that? Let's take a look, who develops OpenStack:

Company (the number of representatives):

- Rackspace (787)

- HP (753)

- Unaffiliated/Others (297)

- Cisco (41)

- Canonical (28)

- Dreamhost (24)

- Red Hat (22)

- Nebula (22)

- CloudScaling (17)

- OpenStack employees (14)

- Morphlabs (13)

- EMC (13)

- Dell (13)

- SUSE (10)

- Piston Cloud (10)

- Yahoo (5)

- IBM (5)

- AT&T (5)

- Tipit (4)

- OpsCode (4)

Another interesting question - how OpenStack is managed. It's managed by the board of directors, which is partly elected, partly appointed, partly formed by these who pay for seats. The Board of Directors appoints an executive director (but he is not appointed yet). Elections are carried out by the whole OpenStack community and they have three categories of community members based on their contribution: Individual, Gold, Platinum. If you want to know more about OpenStack organization - you can read about it here. But the general conclusion is that - it's not simple.

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