OpenStack announced Thursday that, as expected, it's moving to a foundation governance model with a published framework that's supposed to limit Rackspace's dominance of the nascent open source cloud platform.

OpenStack is an alternative to Amazon. Citrix started a competing effort to OpenStack last week around its open source CloudStack, which unlike OpenStack uses Amazon APIs. These APIs are supposed to make Amazon, which now also has the open source Eucalyptus in its corner, the de facto standard.

The new Open Stack Foundation has eight companies kicking in as platinum members including IBM and Red Hat, which have both been working in the background until now. In fact, Red Hat says it ranks third of all corporate members in contributions to date.

The other platinum members include AT&T, Canonical, HP, Nebula, SUSE and, of course, Rackspace which started the whole thing along with NASA.

Cisco, ClearPath Networks, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo are coming as gold members.

That gives it 19 members altogether. The Platinums will pay $500,000 a year and have to make a three-year commitment. The Golds will pay 0.025% of their revenue, which will mean at least $50,000 a year but no more than $200,000. Platinums are also supposed to provide operational resources such as staffing or development environment infrastructure.

According to the foundation's wiki, it's figuring on an annual operating budget of $4 million-$5 million "equal to current Rackspace funding for the same activities today."

The biannual OpenStack Design Summit & Conference will be subsidized primarily through event sponsorships.

Individual members can join for free.