IBM's influence could turn OpenStack into the immediate frontrunner for cloud technologies, both public and private. OpenStack isn't owned by anyone. It's an open-source project with contributions from more than 8,000 people at 1,000 companies, led by Rackspace. It was based on a project that originated at NASA. Anyone can use it for free, though they usually pay some vendor for consulting services and maintenance. With IBM pushing OpenStack, this encourages more enterprises and service providers to use OpenStack, too, instead of VMware's vCloud or Citrix's CloudStack. "We dreamed that one day IBM might get involved and do for OpenStack what they've done for Linux and other open-source communities in the past," Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, told Infoworld editor Eric Knorr. Now IBM is doing just that.