Members of the OpenStack Foundation, the independent organization that Rackspace created to take responsibility for the open-source cloud OS, have met for the first time this week.

The seven-hour long meeting gave the attending executives the opportunity to sort out a lot of the operational details, including who’s going to be in charge of the project.  GigaOm reports that Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source for SUSE has been elected as chairman; Cisco cloud CTO Lew Tucker will be serving as the second in command.

The emphasis on the “open” in OpenStack is evident. The very reason Rackspace spinned off the project is because the ecosystem had begun expressing concerns that the vendor may have too big of a hand in the imitative. These latest appointments confirm that this topic is still on the table.

The fact that the two top dogs are from SUSE and Cisco and not Rackspace, which has been the driving force behind the pre-foundation OpenStack, is key. Last year, some OpenStack proponents bridled at what they saw as Rackspace’s control of the open source cloud effort, only joining after Rackspace started to move the work to a more independent foundation model.

SUSE’s part in OpenStack is pretty interesting. In addition to getting one of its execs in the top post at the Foundation, the Linux firm released a full-fledged enterprise distribution of the platform.

Alan Clark and Lew Tucker’s new titles are pretty much the only buzzworthy items that came out of the unusually long board meeting: VMware, whose vCloud software directly competes with OpenStack, managed to surprise a lot of experts by applying to be a member of the Foundation a few days ago. But as it turns out the application was pretty far down the board’s agenda, and they ran out of time before they could even give it a look.