The Open Infrastructure (OpenInfra) Foundation has announced five inaugural members of its new Associate Member category. Boston University, CERN, Open Source Business Alliance – Federal Association for Digital Sovereignty, OW2 and SODA Foundation form the initial group of Associate Members. This new category of Foundation members was added by the OpenInfra Foundation board to recognize and collaborate more closely with academic and public research institutions and non-profit organizations that use, build or sustain open infrastructure.

Boston University works closely with the OpenInfra Foundation via the OpenInfra Labs project, and has recently announced the Open Research Cloud Initiative. Participating as an Associate Member in the OpenInfra Foundation is a natural step by which Boston University will strengthen its collaboration with the Foundation and deepen its investment in open-source-powered infrastructure.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Physicists and engineers at CERN use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter and understand the fundamental structure and origins of the universe.

Open Source Business Alliance – Federal Association for Digital Sovereignty is a German industry association working to establish open source as the standard in public procurement, in research and business development. It hosts the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project, a manufacturer-independent, free, federatable cloud stack built with the Gaia-X cloud framework in mind.

The mission of OW2 is to promote a code base of open source software for corporate information systems, including middleware, generic business applications and cloud computing platforms. It’s been a long-term partner of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, and the Associate membership confirms this engagement to build the next decade of open infrastructure together.

The SODA Foundation, previously OpenSDS, hosts the SODA Open Data Framework for data mobility from edge to core to cloud. The SODA Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation and includes both open source software and standards to support the increasing need for data autonomy.