OpenStack is no longer just a Rackspace project. While that hosting company did kick off the project back in 2010 by jointly announcing the conversion of NASA’s Nebula project into an open-source project, today the project was handed over to the OpenStack Foundation.

That Foundation will direct the future of the project and handle the management of development through a Technical Committee, a Board of Directors, a User Committee, and a Governance Committee. Among these, the Governance and User Committees are still being finalized.

The Technical Committee, however, has already been chosen. Each project under the OpenStack umbrella was elected a leader during the summer, and now those leaders have taken charge of their respective efforts. While there are now more than 5,000 contributors to the OpenStack project, the elections for the Technical Committee were not exactly contentious. Only the Quantum Project Technical Lead, Dan Wendlandt, had to run against another candidate: Gary Kotton, principal software engineer at Red Hat. The remaining seven Technical Committee members ran unopposed.

As for the board of directors, it’s a who’s who of cloud hosting companies and research firms. It includes Dreamhost CEO Simon Anderson; CERN infrastructure manager Tim Bell (who is also the sole member of the User Committee at the moment); Cloudscaling cofounder and CTO Randy Bias; and Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source at SUSE.

Rackspace remains on the board of directors, represented by its general manage of private cloud, Jim Curry. Other former Rackspace employees are on the board of directors, but many of those initial Rackspace employees are now employed by OpenStack-specific firms like Mirantis and Nebula.

Other companies with employees on the OpenStack board of directors include AT&T, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and Yahoo.

Also within the OpenStack Foundation is the User Committee, which is still being formed. This committee will be the voice of the community to the Technical Committee.

The announcement that the OpenStack Foundation has finally formed comes just a week before the planned availability of the OpenStack Folsom release. That new version should arrive on Sept. 27, and it will include improvements to the virtualized networking project known as Quantum.