VMware has to wait for OpenStack decision

Although the OpenStack Foundation's first board meeting ran for seven hours, some business was not discussed. Specifically, applications from VMware, Intel and NEC to become Gold members of the organisation. The Foundation's executive director, Johnathan Bryce, said the board had covered a lot of topics "including basic finance and compensation things, but we ran out of time", adding that the applications would be considered at a future meeting.

The next scheduled meeting of the board is due on 19 October and, while it is within the board's remit to convene a special meeting to consider the membership applications before then, no plans have been announced to do so. OpenStack's board did make some decisions though, appointing SUSE's Alan Clark as chairman of the board and Cisco's Lew Tucker as vice-chairman. Clark is SUSE's director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source, while Tucker is VP and CTO of Cloud at Cisco.

VMware's decision to apply for OpenStack membership was revealed earlier this week and came as a surprise to many who considered VMware to be the proprietary opposition to open source projects like OpenStack. This was despite VMware's open source interests such as SpringSource, RabbitMQ, and its recent $1.2 billion acquisition of open-source-supporting, virtualised networking specialist Nicira which has developed its own implementation of OpenFlow.

Nicira was already a member of OpenStack and had been taking part in the creation of Quantum, the virtual networking component for OpenStack. How VMware plans to interact with OpenStack is still unclear; it could be limited to just working with OpenStack on Quantum, or, less likely, developing interoperability between VMware ESX and OpenStack. Those interested in VMware's plans will, however, probably have to wait until after the next OpenStack board meeting and a membership decision has been made before any plans are revealed.

(djwm)