Gluster, one of the leading providers of open source storage for public, private and hybrid clouds, has teamed up with Linux Foundation with the goal of promoting and developing Linux.  Gluster’s also growing its board, adding Rob Bearden to the company’s board of directors.  Bearden’s been quite active in the open source community, heading the recently launched Hortonworks as president and COO, with previous leadership positions at SpringSource, JBOSS and Pentaho.  Both SpringSource and JBOSS went on to be acquired by VMware and RedHat respectively.

The Linux Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated in ensuring the growth of Linux by safeguarding the resources of its members and open source development community. Since its formation in 2007, a lot of companies and developers have shown support and extended help in accelerating the growth of Linux.

Known for its scalable, open source storage solutions, Gluster’s products simplifies the task of managing unstructured file data. They find Linux to be an integral part of the success of cloud computing technologies.

“Since the beginning I was dedicated to creating an open source storage solution and Gluster fully supports the open source development, unified resources and the extensive services provided by Linux,” said Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy, co-founder and CTO at Gluster. “We are pleased to be the newest member of the Linux Foundation, expanding our work with Linux and the open source communities.”

Together with Gluster, other tech companies have joined Linux Foundation; basysKom, Codero and Nixu Open, to name a few. These companies are relatively different in nature but collectively shown support for Linux.

“We are pleased to welcome basysKom, Codero, Gluster and Nixu Open to The Linux Foundation,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at The Linux Foundation. “Their membership is a testament to the rapid growth of Linux across market segments and its ability to address new technology opportunities.”

In the same breadth, OpenStack‘s open source cloud initiative is getting more attention thanks to the recent acquisition of Cloud.com by Citrix, which both support OpenStack. Known for providing services to Nokia, GoDaddy and Zynga, Cloud.com is one of the leading cloud-computing providers for the public and private cloud infrastructure. Having Cloud.com on their side gives Citrix a competitive advantage against close rival VMware. Despite the acquisition, Citrix intends to stay committed to OpenStack. This acquisition would position OpenStack as even more relevant in today’s open cloud infrastructure space.