VMware joins Openstack, who is next?

GigaOm's Barb Darrow reports on VMware joining Openstack.

Surprise! VMware will join OpenStack

Never say never. VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation, a group initially backed by other industry giants as a counterweight to VMware’s server virtualization dominance. Intel and NEC are also on deck to join as Gold OSF members.

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Just in time for VMworld, VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation as a Gold member, along with Intel and NEC, according to a post on the OpenStack Foundation Wiki.  The applications for membership are on the agenda of the August 28 OpenStack Foundation meeting.

The guys at VMware figured its worth the money to play in a group that was started as an anti-VMware solution.

OpenStack Gold members, which include Cloudscaling, Dell, MorphLabs, Cisco Systems, and NetApp, pay a fee pegged at 0.25 percent of their revenue — at least $50,000 but capped at $200,000 according to the foundation wiki.  (VMware’s fee will be $66,666, according to the application, submitted by VMware CTO Steve Herrod, which is linked on the wiki post.) Platinum members —  AT&T, Canonical, HP, Rackspace, IBM, Nebula, Red Hat, and SUSE – pay $500,000 per year with a 3-year minimum commitment.

Who else is next to join Openstack?  

When Rackspace and NASA launched the OpenStack Project more than two years ago, it was seen as a competitive response to VMware’s server virtualization dominance inside company data centers and to Amazon’s heft in public cloud computing.