The Linux Foundation swallows OpenStack
Plus: Meta taps X's open source Community Notes; the UN toots its open source trumpet; and more.
In issue #8 of Forkable, the Linux Foundation cements its status as a “foundation of foundations” as it gobbles up the OpenInfra Foundation.
Also, the worlds of Meta and X intersect via the open source, crowdsourced fact-checking tool Community Notes. And Element formalizes a subscription that allows organizations to use the copyleft-licensed Matrix protocol in proprietary products without having to contribute code back.
Oh, and the United Nations is tooting its open source trumpet too, publishing its 8 “open source principles” with an endorsement from the Open Source Initiative.
Have a good weekend when it comes, and if you haven’t subscribed already — please do so below.
Paul
Open issue
OpenStack lands at the Linux Foundation
OpenStack, the open source, open standards-based cloud computing platform designed for running AWS-like environments in private or hybrid clouds, is now formally part of the Linux Foundation.
OpenStack started out as a joint project between Rackspace and NASA back in 2010, transitioning to its own OpenStack Foundation in 2012 which later rebranded as the OpenInfra Foundation having grown beyond its initial focus.
The Linux Foundation, for its part, has also long expanded beyond Linux, emerging as more of a “foundation of foundations” through the years as the umbrella outfit for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; Open Source Security Foundation; Fintech Open Source Foundation; PyTorch Foundation, and more.
With the Open Infrastructure Foundation now transitioning over to the Linux Foundation, this will cement an existing relationship forged through the Open Infrastructure Blueprint, which pulls together the work of Linux, OpenStack, and Kubernetes to guide companies looking to avoid vendor lock-in by combining open technologies.
This formal coming together will also “accelerate data center modernization” by leaning on other open source projects such as PyTorch, which has emerged as a foundational machine learning framework for developers building AI models.
The long and short is that both open source and cloud infrastructure sits at the heart of the AI revolution, so it makes sense for two complementary foundations to merge.
“The data center infrastructure market is undergoing a fundamental reinvention, driven by the colossal demands of AI as well as virtualization migration and digital sovereignty,” Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenInfra Foundation said in a statement this week. "The OpenInfra Foundation is already closely aligned with many of the projects housed at the Linux Foundation that are supporting this reinvention, and the timing is perfect to combine resources and build upon our organizations’ work in driving this trillion-dollar market.”
Read more: OpenStack comes to the Linux Foundation
The rundown
Meta follows X’s open source fact-checking playbook
It’s not too often that Meta and X’s paths will cross in the same Forkable story but, well, here we are.
Some two months after Meta ditched its fact-checking program, the company announced this week that it will soon kick-off a crowdsourced community-driven effort using Community Notes — the open source fact-checking tool developed by the company formerly known as Twitter.
Meta had previously revealed plans to adopt Community Notes, but it has now confirmed it will be landing next week for its U.S. userbase across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
Matrix in its element
Element, the company behind the open source, open standards-based Matrix protocol that helps make messaging apps interoperable, announced a “new” subscription this week that allows companies to circumvent the restrictions of its “copyleft” open source license.
As you’ll all know, open source licenses come in myriad flavours. Back in 2023, Element announced that it was transitioning several of its servers — including the core Matrix server, Synapse — from the permissive Apache 2.0 license to the more restrictive Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3. This meant that customers wanting to implement Matrix in their open source projects would have to contribute any modifications they make back to the Matrix project — or pay for a commercial license.
So in effect, any company or government wanting to develop a commercial or proprietary product atop Matrix would have to arrange a special license with Element to do so. While Element says it has been arranging this on a case-by-case basis since it changed its license, this week the company formalized this process with the launch of its new Build subscription.
It’s technically not a new offering — it is just now being specifically marketed as a product. Prices aren’t being publicized, as it will vary according to the business model of the developer, but generally it will work out as a percentage of the cost of its full-scale, enterprise grade Element Server Suite.
In the words of Element itself, Build exists “…so that when your lawyers tell you there’s ‘a huge copyleft risk,’ we’ve got you covered.”
The UN’s open source principles
The United Nations (UN) is going all-in on open source.
The UN has published its eight open source principles, which provide a “framework to guide the use, development and sharing of open source software” across the UN globally. And the folks at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — so-called “stewards” of the open source definition — are the first to endorse it.
The principles are as follows:
Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects
Contribute back: Encouraging active participation in the Open Source ecosystem
Secure by design: Making security a priority in all software projects
Foster inclusive participation and community building: Enabling and facilitating diverse and inclusive contributions
Design for reusability: Designing projects to be interoperable across various platforms and ecosystems
Provide documentation: Providing thorough documentation for end-users, integrators and developers
RISE (recognize, incentivize, support and empower): Empowering individuals and communities to actively participate
Sustain and scale: Supporting the development of solutions that meet the evolving needs of the UN system and beyond.
Patch notes
After spinning off its database-as-a-service business SkySQL and being taken private, MariaDB is planning to build another database-as-a-service offering — but this time in close collaboration with the open source community via the MariaDB Foundation.
ClickHouse acquired open source observability platform HyperDX for an undisclosed sum.
Onyx, provider of an open source enterprise search and AI assistant, announced a $10 million round of funding this week.
Supabase, an open source Firebase alternative, is raising $100 million at a more-than $2 billion valuation, according to a Bloomberg report this week.
Microsoft previewed a Go-based native port of its open source language TypeScript, which it says will make it run 10 times faster.