Symantec boosts OpenStack Foundation even as it sues some members
The OpenStack Foundation accepted Symantec Corp. into its exclusive club of Gold-level sponsors this week, citing its substantial contributions to the cloud operating system. The move marks a major step forward for the security vendor’s involvement with the project, with which it has had a somewhat tumultuous prior relationship.
Symantec has been active in development of the Keystone user authorization component and the Glance service for backing up virtual machines, the two technologies that map most closely to its business. The company has also helped create much-needed documentation on OpenStack interfaces as well as security and training, with its Operations Guide serving as a reference for many of the organizations running the platform in production today.
Most of the contributors to the project focus on code rather than manuals, OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Johnathan Bryce told SiliconANGLE earlier this year, but documentation is critical to developers and users alike.
What’s curious about Symantec’s stepped-up involvement – and the $200,000 membership fee it pays for Gold status – is that the company has also backed an entity that claims Symantec owns some of the OpenStack code and that is suing several other backers for patent infringement, including Rackspace Inc., which co-invented the framework. It’s unclear how Symantec’s cozier relationship with the Foundation will affect the litigation.
Symantec plans to use the framework as the foundation for an upcoming cloud platform that’s intended to unify its end-point management and virus scanning services on a common, scalable foundation. As part of that effort, Symantec is also investing in other components of OpenStack, most notably the integrated MagnetoDB key-value store.
Although Symantec’s membership may make some other sponsors uncomfortable, it a positive development for the community as a whole. The company is joining fellow enterprise big-wigs such as EMC, Cisco and Dell in the Gold bracket, which now has only eight spots left out of the original 24 openings.
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