The Open19 Foundation — an open data center hardware initiative founded in 2016 by LinkedIn, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and VaporIO — is now a Linux Foundation project. It officially made the move on Jan. 1, after Open19 added Cisco as a board member late last year.

“We [Open19] are the primary open hardware platform for the Linux Foundation membership,” said Open19 Foundation president Zachary Smith. “And now we have two of the three largest OEMs — HPE and Cisco — adopting and supporting Open19, as well as a wide variety of ODMs.”

Open19 is an open platform for servers, storage, and networking that can fit in any 19-inch data center rack environment. Its form factor specifications include a brick cage as well as various server bricks, a power shelf, and blind-mate power and data connectors.

Before he became Open19 Foundation president, Smith was an Open19 user. As CEO of Packet, an edge computing startup Smith co-founded, he deployed Open19 hardware in Packet’s data centers — this was before Equinix bought Packet for $335 million last year and made Smith its managing director of bare metal.

But also last year, Smith took over the role of Open19 Foundation president from its founding president, LinkedIn’s Yuval Bachar. And in this role, working with board members from VaporIO and HPE, “we determined we needed a broader set of enterprise and service provider users to really widen the adoption of the technology,” Smith said. “It just happened to align with what the Linux Foundation was doing.”

While the Linux Foundation is arguably the most influential group when it comes to open source software, it’s only recently moved into open source networking and hardware with projects including LF Edge. It’s also worth noting that Equinix serves on the LF Edge governing board, and Smith expects the two projects to continue working closely together.

The Linux Foundation formed its edge computing initiative, LF Edge, in 2019. And around the same time, the Open 19 Foundation began pushing its data center platform to the edge while collaborating with the Linux Foundation.

“Suddenly the Linux Foundation needs an outlet for hardware,” Smith said. “And we thought, wow, this is great, we can keep our operating model, which is around form factor and a really community-driven approach to innovation within the data center. But do so with access to a much larger community” that the Linux Foundation provides.

Plus, the COVID-19 pandemic proved that it’s really difficult — and expensive — to run a standalone foundation, maintain a community, and host events, Smith said. “There’s just so muck related to it. And we get so many great benefits working with Linux Foundation beyond their approach to governance. We get access to run within the communities, and we get to be a part of huge events like the CNCF, Kubernetes, LF Edge, and that’s really powerful for our members, who are often members in those organizations as well."

So, the two groups made it official. “As of Jan. 1, we are officially part of the Linux Foundation,” Smith said.