The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) is no more, or at least in name. Backed by what it deems a need to broaden its view of open source-based infrastructure, OSF has changed its name to the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF), a change that also ties in nicely with the organization’s annual Open Infrastructure Show.

Jonathan Bryce, who remains executive director through the name change, explained that the move builds “on the groundwork that our community has laid over the last 10 years through a variety of open source projects, and really going out and tackling all of this opportunity that lies ahead of us in the next decade of open infrastructure.”

Bryce noted that he did not think enough was being done to provide application developers with the infrastructure they need to develop better use cases. He cited the lack of new infrastructure options targeted at use cases that are seeing increased interest.

“We need infrastructure for artificial intelligence, infrastructure for cloud native applications, infrastructure for edge computing,” Bryce said. “And we think that it's really important that this infrastructure is developed openly in a community driven way so that it's not something that's just controlled and owned and really driven by a handful of companies.”

The name change from the OpenStack Foundation to the Open Infrastructure Foundation also pivots the group to focus more on its slate of non-OpenStack projects that don’t yet have the deployment base as OpenStack. These include Airship and StarlingX, both of which have garnered deployments in support of 5G networks from AT&T and Verizon. OIF’s other projects include Kata Containers, OpenInfra Labs, Zuul, and the newly adopted Magma project.

That last one was developed by Facebook and is an open source software platform targeted at extending the mobile core. Bryce described it as a way to create 4G LTE, 5G, and carrier WiFi networks “at a much lower cost so that you can deploy more networks in more places where right now they're often underserved in terms of their mobile access or the quality of their mobile networks.”

OIF is also rolling over most of its vendor support base. It’s most gilded platinum level sponsors include ongoing support from AT&T, Ericsson, Huawei, Red Hat, and Tencent Cloud. New members to that club include Ant Group, Facebook Connectivity, FiberHome, and Wind River. Overall, OIF counts 57 “founding” members.

Despite the name change and slight alteration to vendor’s fronting the most financing, Bryce said that the overall structure of the group will remain the same. “We'll have corporate members who help to support the projects, we’ll have individual members that are participating in it, (and) we’ll have projects that that we kind of are directly helping,” he explained.

Bryce also reiterated that despite the OpenStack Foundation name change, OpenStack is not going away.

“OpenStack is still in our view the heart of open infrastructure,” he said. “It's a very fundamental way of managing compute, storage, and networking that provides an option to run your own environment and control it all.”

Instead, Bryce said that the move goes back to the need to better support real-world use cases.

“It’s less about moving beyond OpenStack and more about acknowledging what our community is already doing in the real world in production,” Bryce said. “They are having to work with multiple open source projects. And they're bringing this great technology that's coming from these different communities together.”

The organization last week released the 22nd OpenStack iteration. Among the updates were moves to more tightly integrate OpenStack with Kubernetes. Bryce said those moves highlight continues to be close interaction between the two projects, which often share a similar developer community pool, despite those two platforms residing in different open source groups.

“There's a lot of interaction that happens both at the foundation level and at the technology level, but to me what's really important is are we getting this into production,” Bryce said. “Are we collectively across all of these groups building software that people can run. There's far more open source software out there that's not in any foundation, and that's why I think it's important to make sure that we are focused on the end goal, which is running these projects in production for use cases that people can build their businesses on.”