Dive Brief:

• Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth says he is "excited about the maturing of OpenStack." Speaking at the OpenStack Summit, Shuttleworth said vendor withdrawal from OpenStack is actually a "sign of a healthy, maturing project," reports ComputerWorld UK .

• Shuttleworth said Canonical’s OpenStack software stack has seen strong growth and the company's OpenStack cloud division has been profitable since 2015. His positive portrayal of Canonical's performance comes just as the company is reportedly preparing to IPO.

• Changes with OpenStack are a sign the effort is solidifying, eliminating services that were not going to last long term, according to Shuttleworth, ComputerWorld UK reports. "In the enterprise market what we see is customers now coming forward with a much clearer idea of what they really want, which is private infrastructure that behaves like a public cloud."

Dive Insight:

Last year Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced they would no longer support OpenStack. Then earlier this year, reports surfaced that Intel will no longer support the OpenStack Innovation Center, a project it formed with Rackspace two years ago to increase the use of OpenStack software technology in the enterprise.

But OpenStack is not losing support from customers, which may be a more important indication of the project’s health. In a recent interview with CIO Dive, Lauren Sell, vice president of the OpenStack Foundation, said deployments of OpenStack grew 56% in 2016 and the beginning of 2017 over 2015.

One appeal of open hardware and software is preventing vendor lock-in. Companies are growing weary of contracts that commit them to one vendor for an extended period of time, especially as technology evolves so rapidly. Businesses are therefore increasingly looking to more open hardware and software.