The open source cloud pioneer Mirantis says it’s hired Bias to hold itself “accountable as a responsible open source citizen.”
Considering the fact that Mirantis has focused on cloud and enterprise open source since its inception in 1999, I would have thought it would have had an open source program office long ago. Evidently not, because today the Silicon Valley-based company announced that it’ll now be positioning open source initiatives under a new OSPO that it’s formed.
I’m taking this to mean that Mirantis is doubling down on advertising its expertise as an open source practitioner as much as it’s marketing its out-of-the-box software solutions, as it becomes more obvious to enterprises of all stripes that in a hybrid multi-cloud world, open source is the backbone of IT infrastructure.
As a pioneering cloud company, Mirantis is nothing if not about infrastructure.
To kick-start it’s new OSPO, Mirantis said it’s hired Randy Bias as VP of Open Source Strategy and Technology. The Program Office, Mirantis said, will focus on encouraging community involvement and engagement through specific open source projects. Bias’s job, if I’m reading the press release correctly, is to make sure that Mirantis keeps to the letter and spirit of open source. It says he’ll be responsible for “ensuring greater transparency in Mirantis’s open source engagement, and providing internal and external reporting to hold Mirantis accountable as a responsible open source citizen.”
“More and more, businesses are relying on open source to drive their critical infrastructure,” Bias said in a statement. “Open source has always been foundational to Mirantis, and we recognize the need for a deeper investment and commitment to communities that are strategic to us. Mirantis is reinvesting and hiring in engineering teams that will focus exclusively on open source contributions and community development.”
Mirantis’s and Bias’s Synchronicity
Bias comes to the table with a resume that’s rich in both cloud and open source, which are Mirantis’s reasons for being. At various times during the current century, he’s been involved with organizations such as Docker, OpenStack, Dell EMC, Linux Foundation, Juniper Networks, Cisco, and others companies and organizations that play in the cloud-native and/or open source sandbox.
“I know Randy as an amazing open source advocate and evangelist, and am looking forward to seeing Randy further Mirantis’s already deep commitment to the community,” said Brian Behlendorf, who’s been associated with the Linux Foundation for years, currently as chief AI strategist.
The three-and-a-half years Bias spent as a director at the OpenStack Foundation gives him plenty of common ground with Mirantis, which is one of the foundation’s founding members, and which started its own OpenStack distribution in 2013, putting it in competition with the likes of Red Hat and Hewlett-Packard.
“Mirantis has been instrumental in the success of the OpenStack project over the years and the team continues as a strong advocate for openly developed software,” Thierry Carrez, general manager of the Open Infrastructure Foundation said in a statement. “We congratulate Mirantis on the establishment of their OSPO and look forward to the innovation that Mirantis’s collaboration with and investment in the community can deliver.”
