The newly-formed OpenStack Board of Directors voted Friday afternoon to accept VMware, along with Intel and NEC into the project as gold members. Jonathan Bryce of Rackspace, who is one of the leaders of the OpenStack project, alerted OpenStack Foundation members via an e-mail of the news Friday.  

:

VMware applied to join the OpenStack project a few weeks ago but at the OpenStack board of directors last meeting in late August, there was no vote on applications for new companies to join the project. The board convened during a special meeting on Friday and accepted all three gold member applications. Gold member companies pay between $50,000 and $200,000 to be a part of OpenStack, based on the companys annual revenue. Other gold members include Cisco, Cloudscaling, Dell, Dreamhost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo. Platinum members include AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, and SUSE.

VMwares acceptance into OpenStack comes on the heels of it closing on the $1.2 billion . Before its acquisition by VMware, Nicira was a major contributor to OpenStacks virtual networking project.