The Open Infrastructure Foundation, the open-source foundation that hosts projects like the OpenStack cloud computing platform and Starling X edge computing stack, today announced that it is launching two regional hubs — OpenInfra Asia based in Singapore and OpenInfra Europe based in Belgium — to better promote and protect open source in those regions. The Foundation specifically notes that while OpenInfra Asia and Europe are their own legal entities, it’s not splitting up the foundation. Instead, it’s describing them as hubs, which are meant to give the foundation a better mechanism to support its local membership organizations and their needs.
Thanks in part to OpenStack’s popularity in Europe and Asia, the OpenInfra Foundation’s membership organizations are already almost evenly divided between Europe (38.8%), Asia (32.5%) and the rest of the world. Members in those regions also face very different policies and regulations (like the EU Cyber Resilience Act) and the Foundation argues that these regional entities will provide its community with the legal standing to participate and influence policy discussions. In this context, it’s also worth noting that given the nature of the OpenInfra Foundation’s flagship OpenStack project as a platform for building private clouds, data sovereignty and governance are often at the heart of what its users are looking for.
“The world has changed, and open source needs regional resiliency and action to ensure vital software technologies continue to be developed in the open,” he said. “Key regional issues have emerged, like digital sovereignty in the EU, that have created an opportunity for OpenInfra regional hubs to facilitate collaboration and discussion, coordinate responses, and give a voice to the concerns of the OpenInfra ecosystem.”
The individual hubs will launch with their own advisory boards that will then decide on what the hubs will focus on. As of now, the hubs don’t have their own leadership teams, though current OpenStack employees based in these regions will support the hubs. Over time, though, that may change.
