In a move to build buzz ahead of next week’s OpenStack Conference here in San Francisco, eighteen major technology companies have announced their intent to become paying members of the OpenStack Foundation, the open source cloud platform’s governing body. AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, and SUSE will become Platinum members once the foundation launches, while Cisco, ClearPath, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, and Piston Cloud Computing will be Gold.

Previously, project co-founder Rackspace Hosting was picking up OpenStack’s tab, which the official wiki places at around between $4 and 5 million dollars annually. But the OpenStack Foundation is seeking to raise around that same amount from these new members ($500,000/year from Platinum members, .025% of annual revenues with a minimum of $20,000 and a maximum of $500,000 from Gold members), taking governance further out of Rackspace’s hands and putting it back with the community.

All eighteen of these members have a proven commitment to the OpenStack platform, with each a code contributor to last week’s major “Essex” release. Needless to say, they all plan on continuing to add their expertise to OpenStack in the future.

The OpenStack Foundation is still a more-or-less hypothetical body: These first confirmed members will take point on the legal issues around creating specific bylaws based around the existing general framework, with draft charters up for community review as the process goes on.

The goal is to have a charter ratified by both the Rackspace Board and the OpenStack Community before the end of the third quarter of 2012. Oh, and an important side-note: You don’t have to be a multi-million dollar corporation to vote, and OpenStack Foundation membership is free for individuals.

In what some pundits are already starting to call a “war” between OpenStack and the recently open-sourced Apache CloudStack project (I remain to be convinced of any meaningful competition between the two), this kind of financial support is a major edge. And it goes a long way towards freeing the project from what some industry-watchers see as Rackspace’s iron grip.

But I’m hopeful that the funding and the support can accelerate OpenStack’s maturity cycle quickly enough that we start to see some real enterprise adoption (HP Converged Cloud notwithstanding) sooner rather than later, or else the growing popularity of proprietary clouds like Amazon EC2 could end this party before it’s begun.