We wanted a community where people with similar philosophies about cloud architecture and open-source software can openly collaborate together. We believe in open source, open design, open development and an open community that is fully transparent—not a cathedral, a bazaar.

Institutions and service providers with physical hardware that they'd like to use for large-scale cloud deployments. (Additionally, companies who have specific requirements that prevent them from running in a public cloud.)

This is not yet code that comes with certification from operating system or hardware vendors. Instead it's aimed at providers, institutions, and enterprises with highly technical operations teams that have the capabilities and needs to turn physical hardware into large-scale cloud deployments.

Still, wide adoption of an open-source, open-standards cloud should be huge for everyone. It means customers won't have to fear lock-in and technology companies can participate in a growing market that spans cloud providers.

A great analogy comes from the early days of the Internet: the transition away from fractured, proprietary flavors of UNIX toward open-source Linux. An open cloud stands to provide the same benefits for large-scale cloud computing that the Linux standard provided inside the server.

Yes, in that we have users and contributors who are headquartered worldwide and we expect to see OpenStack deployments pop up outside the US as public clouds soon. It should be noted, though, that the only current localization effort is to Japanese thanks to contributions from NTT DATA and, to start, the documentation will only be available in English.

Institutions and service providers with physical hardware that they'd like to use for large-scale cloud deployments. In addition, companies who have specific requirements which prevent them from running in a public cloud.

OpenStack is probably not something that the average business would consider deploying themselves yet. The big news for end customers is the potential for a halo effect of providers adopting an open and standard cloud: easy migration, cloud-bursting, better security audits, and a large ecosystem of compatible tools and services that work across cloud providers.

Over 25 companies have agreed to support the mission of OpenStack by providing architectural input, contributing code, and / or integrating it into their business offering.

We expect many developers to contribute to the OpenStack project. The contributors can be checked through the code repository in Launchpad.

The OpenStack Wiki contains more detailed information for the project.

Our goal is to produce the ubiquitous Open Source cloud computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private cloud providers regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.

Developers can download the code and submit patches at the OpenStack repository hosted on Launchpad. OpenStack believes in open source, open design, open development, all in an open community so anyone can participate.

Companies can get involved in two ways:

First, fund their developers to contribute to the project.

Second—and most important—make money on it! The more companies that bake it into their offering—to distribute, to put their code on top of, to provide consulting services, etc—the more that OpenStack will be adopted and move to being a ubiquitous open platform.

Start coding - it is an open source project! Many companies are also hiring developers to work on the OpenStack project. Please see the jobs page for a list of opportunities within the community.

OpenStack requires contributions to be released under the Apache 2.0 license, and have licensing information in the header when uploaded to the public code repository. This submission method makes all contributions immediately available to all community members under the Apache 2.0 license.

Our Contributor License Agreement is based on the Apache Software Foundation form, and we concur with their FAQ.

The best resource is the OpenStack project team. You can reach them through the mailing lists on Launchpad or by logging into IRC and joining #openstack on FreeNode.