In the latest victories for open source data center proponents, server suppliers including Gigabyte, Celestica, Flex, and Inspur are developing products that are compliant with the Open19 Foundation’s standard.

“We have seven types of production servers available for testing, which will go to production in the next few months,” said LinkedIn’s Yuval Bachar, president and chairman of the Open19 Foundation board of directors. “And to make it very easy to consume that technology, we are working to create a marketplace on our website to showcase the Open19 technology.”

Also, data center operator New Continuum Holdings earlier this month joined the Open19 Foundation with plans to “integrate this new technology into our service capabilities,” according to a statement from New Continuum Chairman and CEO Eli Scher.

It’s been a busy past year for the group, which launched in May 2017.

The Open19 Foundation grew out of the open data center concept that LinkedIn started in 2016 to create an open platform that can fit any 19-inch rack environment. In addition to LinkedIn, founding members include GE Digital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Flex, and Vapor IO.

It now counts 24 hardware and software vendors as members, plus another 26 prospective companies that it hopes to transition to full-fledged members by the end of the year.

Last month it added a new board member, Packet CEO and founder Zachary Smith. “Zack Smith is one of the first CEOs to deploy Open19 in their infrastructure,” Bachar said.

And it’s gearing up for its first summit next month in San Jose, California.

The Foundation is also finalizing how companies can contribute open source projects. Bachar said there will be two types of contribution. One involves contributing specifications that will then become open source and available to the public. The second can only be used by Open19 members.

“The second level of contribution is a full-blown version of the project, which can be reproduced: all the manufacturing files, source files for hardware and software, everything is going to be in that package,” he said. “For this level, we can only allow members of the Foundation to consume the package.”

It’s also finalizing details for multi-company contributions.

Additionally, the Open19 Foundation is collaborating with other open source efforts like the Open Compute Project (OCP). And, in fact, LinkedIn joined the FaceBook-led initiative earlier this summer.

While both groups focus on open hardware and software for the data center, they have fundamental differences. For example, Open19 doesn’t require suppliers to open source their intellectual property.

“Joining OCP is complimentary to the work we are doing in the [Open19] Foundation,” Bachar said. “It’s another avenue for us to get open hardware and software in the data center.”