It's official: The OpenInfra Foundation is now part of the Linux Foundation. The ink is dry, the members have voted, and we’ve merged our governance, our mission, and most importantly—our people—with one of the most impactful forces in open source.

Now that the closing is behind us, I’ve been reflecting on what this moment means—not just for OpenInfra, but for the entire open source infrastructure ecosystem.

And in short: I think it’s a watershed moment.

When I say that, I don’t mean it in a "look at us" kind of way. I mean that something fundamental has shifted. For the first time, the open source standards for operating systems (Linux), cloud infrastructure (OpenStack), and containers (Kubernetes) are all under the same collaborative umbrella. This alignment gives us the scale, shared infrastructure, and reach to build what comes next. Together.

We’ve Been Heading Here for a While

Back in 2010, when OpenStack launched from Rackspace and NASA, we had a clear vision—but few models to follow. The Linux Foundation was strong, but not yet the multi-project powerhouse it is today. So we created the OpenStack Foundation, and later evolved into the OpenInfra Foundation to reflect the growing suite of projects and real-world use cases beyond OpenStack.

Fifteen years later, the world looks different. The Linux Foundation now hosts Kubernetes, PyTorch, OpenSSF, and more. Our own projects—OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul—are powering some of the world’s largest production environments across AI, telecom, finance, and government. The truth is, our communities have been working side-by-side for years. This just makes it official.

Why Now?

Because open source has changed. It’s more regulated. More complex. More interconnected. The "just throw the code over the wall" days are behind us—and for good reason. We need legal support, security frameworks, policy guidance, and cohesive user experience strategies. The Linux Foundation has invested in those things. So instead of duplicating efforts, OpenInfra projects now have access to those resources.

Also: AI.

AI is not just another trend. It’s the biggest technological shift I’ve seen in my lifetime, and it’s rewriting infrastructure requirements in real time. More compute. More specialized hardware. More pressure on transparency, governance, and scale.

And that’s exactly where open source shines—when we collaborate across domains, when we don’t let "not invented here" slow us down, and when we focus on building usable, scalable solutions together.

That’s why we launched the Open Infrastructure Blueprint. It's a framework to help organizations build AI-ready infrastructure using a combination of open source technologies—from Linux to OpenStack to Kubernetes to PyTorch. Now, with all those communities living under one roof, we can accelerate that collaboration even more.

What We’ve Built—and What We’re Bringing With Us

I’m incredibly proud of what the OpenInfra community has built. If you haven’t been following closely, you might not know that OpenStack is running in more than 45 million cores of production compute today. You might not know that Kata Containers is now used in some of the most security-sensitive environments on Earth—like Ant Group, Alipay, Microsoft Azure, and AliCloud. Or that StarlingX is enabling edge infrastructure for telecoms and industrial use cases that don’t get headlines but quietly run the modern world.

These aren’t hobbyist projects. They are critical infrastructure.

And they’re not going anywhere. We’ve carefully carried forward our governance model, our technical community processes, and our community-first approach. We rewrote the paperwork, yes—but we preserved the DNA. These are still OpenInfra projects, driven by their communities, now with even more wind in their sails.

Collaboration Without Borders

So what does success look like a year from now?

I hope it looks like smoother paths for developers moving across projects. I hope it means operators showing up to events and finding all the technologies they use—together, in one place. Whether it’s OpenInfra Days, KubeCons, or brand-new events we haven’t dreamed up yet, I want us to build a space where cross-project collaboration is the norm, not the exception.

And I hope it looks like more people joining the movement. Because this isn’t about a foundation. It’s about removing the barriers—organizational, legal, cultural—that keep us from solving hard problems together.

Thank You

This move didn’t happen overnight. It took countless hours from our board, especially our chair, Julia Kreger. It took careful coordination with the Linux Foundation team, who worked with us through round after round of revision to make sure we got it right. And it took community input at every step—on mailing lists, in IRC chats, over Zoom calls, and in direct messages. You showed up. You voted. You asked hard questions. And together, we did this.

So thank you. Every single person who’s contributed code, reviewed patches, organized events, answered questions, or just showed up: this is your win.

The Road Ahead

I don’t see this as a victory lap. I see it as the next leg of the journey. There will be bumps—we know that. But we’ve always embraced complexity as an opportunity. We’ve always built for the real world, not the hype cycle. And we’ve never shied away from reinventing ourselves when the mission demanded it.

Well, the mission demands it now.

We are entering an era where infrastructure will determine who can participate in the future of AI—and how responsibly we get there. That’s not just a technical challenge. It’s a human one. And I believe the open source community is best positioned to meet it.

Let’s build infrastructure that works—for everyone.

And let’s do it together.