The OpenStack Foundation, an independent entity that is not officially in charge of the cloud operating system, has officially launched, after a year in the works. Rackspace, the co-creator of the project, decided to spin-off OpenStack last year when the more prominent members   of the ecosystem argued that it, at least at the time, had too much influence over it.

This complaint has been remedied this week. The OpenStack Foundation has about $10 million in the bank thanks to generous contributions from the ecosystem, and its management is compromised of representatives from all the major backers – including Rackspace.

Rackspace co-founder  Jonathan Bryce is resigning from the cloud host to become the full time executive director of OpenStack, and he is joined by a number of other executives from all around the industry. Among them is DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson, who was recently elected to the board of directors.

“DreamHost has a vision to enable the world’s entrepreneurs and developers to create, share and prosper on the Internet,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. “We passionately believe that open source software, and open, compatible cloud services, are the key to the next wave of growth and innovation worldwide. OpenStack is the right platform and community to enable this shift, and the formation of the OpenStack Foundation is another step in demonstrating the long term commitment of the community to this mission.”

In just two short years, OpenStack managed to become a very big deal. VMware went as far as paying $1.2 billion for Nciria in exchange for a piece of the action: the latter firm offers a virtualization platform built specifically for enterprise-scale OpenStack environments. The Network Virtualization Platform is only one solution Nciria’s product line-up, but it was most likely one of the biggest factors that helped seal the deal with VMware.