This week OpenStack turned two. The open-source cloud initiative was started by Rackspace and NASA in 2010 and within 24 months, the project managed to gain hundreds of supporters and even beat a few milestones set forth by Linux.

In the 84^th week of OpenStack’s existence the project already had 166 different organizations supporting it. That compared with the 180 active contributors that Linux managed to bring aboard in 828 weeks, according to some statistics that Rackspace released recently.

There’s no doubt that OpenStack managed to gain a ton of momentum, and it’s doing a pretty good job at preserving it. Rackspace itself leveraged the solution to power its flagship cloud, and a number of other companies are leveraging the cloud OS to power their offerings as well.

Piston Cloud is one such firm – it offers a commercial distribution of the open code that offers an extension of the core capabilities to a number of different areas, with VDI being one of them as of last month. Piston teamed up with GridCentric to double the amount of virtual desktops that can run in an OpenStack environment.  And CumuLogic, which debuted its flagship PaaS solution just this week, supports OpenStack alongside vSphere and CloudStack.

The occasion also justifies a bit of forethought. The upcoming Folsom distribution will arrive sometime in September and will come with a network virtualization component, while the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) will feature an “OpenStack Day” to celebrate the project’s 2-year birthday.

Rackspace Cloud Builder VP Jim Curry gave his take on the event, and on what he thinks  the project contributes to the cloud in an interview.

”Cloud was not this big two years ago. At that time, customers had to choose one technology or another, the choices being Amazon and VMware. It’ s not that they were bad technologies — they’re great technologies with a lot to offer but by choosing one of those you limit the opportunity to go to another,” Curry said.