Openstack the cloud operating system development effort said major global firms including AT&T, Canonical, Cisco, and Dell have agreed to participate in the foundation's new governance set up.

A statement issued on behalf of Red Hat said HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, and SUSE indicated an intent to join the foundation as Platinum Members, and Cisco, ClearPath Networks, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo! as Gold Members based on the principles outlined in the published mission and framework.

Each plans to provide technical and financial resources to ensure the long-term viability of the project.  

“The OpenStack Foundation will be an independent body providing shared resources to help achieve the OpenStack mission by protecting, empowering, and promoting OpenStack software and the community around it, including users, developers and the entire ecosystem,” the statement said.

"In less than two years, we’ve had five software releases from hundreds of contributors from over 50 companies, and the cloud operating system has grown from two core projects to five core projects across compute, storage and networking,” said Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Project Policy Board and co-founder Rackspace Cloud. “The formation of a Foundation is about preserving and accelerating what's working and moving the community building activities to a neutral long-term home with a broad base of support.”

The next step in the Foundation building process is to form a drafting committee with the legal help of committed Platinum and Gold members, who will write the detailed Bylaws based on the published framework, and will publish drafts for community review. The goal is to reach a final draft for ratification by the Rackspace Board and the OpenStack community by Q3-2012.

In addition to Platinum and Gold membership, the OpenStack Foundation will also be open to Individual Members for free.

Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and VP Product Strategy at Canonical: "Ubuntu and OpenStack share key values: high quality governance, a focus on computing at scale, reliable schedules and robust releases. The success of OpenStack depends on the quality of its leadership, and we are delighted to support the OpenStack Foundation as a forum for that leadership."

Sean Roberts, Infrastructure Strategy, Yahoo!, said: "Continuing Yahoo's strong support of open source, Yahoo is developing OpenStack for our infrastructure. We believe this emerging technology will allow Yahoo to increase our competitive infrastructure advantage. To facilitate the long term stability and new features that Yahoo and the rest of the OpenStack collaborators want and crave, Yahoo will continue to support and nurture the OpenStack foundation into the future."