The Four Opens: Open Source Beyond the Code

In practice, this translates to depending on hardware and software infrastructure through daily use and needing to support and influence their evolution. Access to infrastructure and its evolution path is becoming part of basic human rights. A trivial way to provide it is through open source, which means people have access to infrastructure, including the ability to get involved at any stage of the lifecycle of its building blocks. This is what we call open infrastructure.

The Open Infrastructure Foundation (formerly known as the OpenStack Foundation)1 has a mission to build communities that write code that runs in production all around the globe to power critical infrastructure as well as services in high demand. This article introduces the guiding principles—the Four Opens2—that the Open Infrastructure Foundation and its communities follow to navigate the (sometimes stormy) waters of open source software development, open collaboration, and more.