Hi OpenInfra Board Members,

I hope you’re all having a great start to May. Several of us are about to head to different OpenInfra Days in Europe and are excited to meet with the local communities! I wanted to share an OpenInfra Foundation staff update via email with some of the latest momentum and progress we are making since we are not having a board meeting this month where we would have normally presented this staff update.

To best represent the recent activities, I wanted to organize them around the 2024 OpenInfra Foundation goals.

Strengthening OpenInfra projects

For the OpenStack project, several initiatives are in motion to improve the software through new releases delivering impactful features as well as improving project brand awareness.

As we discussed at a board meeting earlier this year, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has provided a massive opportunity to the OpenStack and StarlingX ecosystem. Forrester reached out to us and asked for a briefing in which a group of several analysts said they were getting “truckloads of inquiries” about OpenStack being an alternative for VMware.

We distributed a VMware strategy survey to OpenInfra Platinum, Gold and Silver members. With the information gathered, we learned that 82% of polled OpenInfra members have already received interest from organizations seeking a VMware alternative and 61% of respondents have already successfully migrated a VMware customer to an OpenStack-based product. 100% of members were interested in an OpenInfra Foundation ecosystem collaboration to make the most of this opportunity, which we will be kicking off in the next few weeks.
We are also commissioning a third party report from an industry reporter who has covered the space for 15+ years. This will provide external validation with market statistics that we can all leverage.

We are making progress on a whitepaper that shows the value of integrating OpenStack, Kubernetes and Linux. Kendall Nelson is leading the development and hosted a kickoff meeting last week with several volunteers from the OpenStack and StarlingX community. I am also working with OpenInfra Platinum and Gold members to create reference architectures and customer case studies. We are aiming to publish this at the OpenInfra Summit Asia in September.

The OpenStack community delivered its 29th release, Caracal, last month and the StarlingX community delivered its 9.0 release as well. Here is just some of the coverage from these two releases. Please share with your networks and congratulate the community members on these important milestones!

Zvonko Kaiser, a newly elected member of the Kata Containers AC, presented NVIDIA’s use of Kata Containers at KubeCon EU

Defending the OpenInfra Vision of Open Source

Thierry Carrez was re-elected as vice chair to the OSI Board as it tackles important challenges, like defining open source AI or momentum around new restrictive licenses.
At the end of April, Llama 3 was released as the newest AI model claiming to be open source (it is not). Mark Collier took a stance in this New Stack article explaining why using “open source” incorrectly needs to be something we all band together to defend.
The OpenInfra Foundation staff continues to engage with the relevant stakeholders to follow progress and engage as necessary around the EU’s Cyber-Resilience Act. Thierry shared an update to the board mailing list last week on the latest developments.
Upon hearing about a “Post-Open Zero Cost License,” Mark talked to a reporter and was quoted in the Register defending open source licensing.

Increasing OpenInfra Impact

OpenInfra Days Europe is kicking off tomorrow with OpenInfra Day Sweden! Across the five OpenInfra Days events, over 700 community members are registered and several organizations are sponsoring the events. We will have several Foundation staff traveling to the events over the next few weeks and are excited to connect with our local communities! We would like to thank all of the community organizers who have made these events possible! If you are attending any of these events, please let us know.
The OpenInfra Summit Asia is being held in Suwon, South Korea September 3-4. Registration, sponsorship and the CFP are open for the OpenInfra Summit Asia! The CFP closes May 29, so please encourage your teams to submit presentations to be included in the event!
Last month, we had another virtual PTG where we had over 30 teams hold over 60 hours of discussions with over 600 attendees. The project teams published summaries from the discussions held that week.
The OpenInfra Asia Advisory Board met for the 2nd time in 2024, ramping up for the OpenInfra Summit Asia and the OpenInfra Europe Advisory Board will meet in June to reflect back on OIDs Europe.

We have a lot of exciting momentum across the various OpenInfra project communities as well as with the events being hosted around the world. Thank you to everyone for your contribution and collaboration!

Cheers,

Allison