Mass of Contributors
OpenStack community officials say Linux is a great example of an open-source technology that has been widely adopted. However, comparatively, OpenStack has been and is being adopted and supported faster than Linux. For instance, OpenStack reached the same amount of contributors as Linux in one-seventh the time.
Contributing Companies
OpenStack reached the same amount of companies contributing to the platform as Linux in one-tenth the time.
Downloads
There have been more than 200,000 downloads of OpenStack from the central repository, not counting the growing number of distributions from companies like Canonical, Piston, StackOps and SUSE.
Internationally Loved
More than 20 different countries were represented at the April 2012 OpenStack Design Summit and Conference. User groups and conferences have been organized across the globe, including Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea and the U.K.
Fifth Release
OpenStack is currently in its fifth release, known as Essex, which focuses on quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high-performance computing (HPC) deployments.
Upcoming Sixth Release
The OpenStack community is working on its sixth release, a milestone release that focuses on quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high-performance computing (HPC) deployments, as well as network virtualization, among other things.
History
OpenStack is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing project by Rackspace Cloud and NASA, a solid pedigree honed on some real projects.
Foundation
OpenStack is transitioning to a foundation governance model and is looking for an executive director to take the helm from Rackspace, which has been leading things. This move would be much like that of IBM, which dominated the Eclipse community before turning over governance of the effort to the Eclipse Foundation under executive director Mike Milinkovich.
Growth
More than 150 companies have joined the OpenStack project since its inception, including AMD, Intel, Canonical, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and Yahoo. In April, 19 companies, including AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE, Cisco, ClearPath, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo, announced their intent to become Platinum or Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation when it launches.
Event Attendees
In less than two years, OpenStack Summit & Conference attendance has grown from 75 people in July 2010 to more than 1,000 attendees in July 2012.