The Linux Foundation and OpenStack – a new chapter for cloud-native infrastructure

Effective July 23rd, 2025 the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF) has officially joined one of the world’s largest and most influential open source communities: the Linux Foundation. This strategic move reflects the accelerating trend toward open source standardization and democratization – a movement Canonical has proudly supported since its inception.

As a long-standing and active member of both communities, Canonical is excited about this merger and the opportunities it brings. In this post, we share what this change means for our customers, the Ubuntu community, the Linux Foundation, and OpenStack.

From OpenStack to Open Infrastructure

The journey began in 2010 when OpenStack was first launched as a collaborative project led by NASA and Rackspace. As a leader in open source, Canonical recognized its potential early on and was deeply impressed by its vision and mission. OpenStack quickly gained momentum, attracting contributors from across the industry and leading to the formation of the OpenStack Foundation.

Canonical became a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation and, for over a decade, has helped shape its development. We’ve effectively guided users through its complexity, made deployment simpler, and contributed extensively to the upstream code – today ranking as the third-largest contributor, with over 25K commits since the inaugural Austin release.

As OpenStack grew in popularity, the OpenStack Foundation became a hub for other open source projects. Initiatives like Kata Containers and Zuul further extended the impact of open infrastructure. These collaborations ultimately led to the transformation of the OpenStack Foundation into the Open Infrastructure Foundation, with the goal of unifying open source software for building open infrastructure.