Philly became the center of the action for those who use a massive open source project called OpenStack last month.

Comcast hosted one of the OpenStack community’s regular meetups, drawing more than 150 developers from companies like Rackspace, Time Warner and Red Hat to The Hub in Rittenhouse Square for the two-day event.

The telecom giant has been using OpenStack, whose functionality Comcast senior fellow Jon Moore likened to running your own private Amazon Web Services, since 2012. Comcast’s technological pride and joy, the X1 platform, was powered by OpenStack (Mark Muehl, senior vice president of product engineering, gave a product demo as part of a keynote at the 2013 OpenStack Summit).

Comcast is also a big contributor to the project, chipping in more than 36,000 lines of code to it, according to a recent blog post. Moore said Comcast is “investing heavily” in the project.


(As of 2013, top contributors included Rackspace, Red Hat and IBM. Also, counting lines of code is just one way to measure contributions to an open source project.)

“We don’t want to just be only consumers of open source,” Moore said in an interview last week. “It’s important to give back.”

Comcast employees are also scheduled to speak at the upcoming OpenStack Spring Summit in Vancouver.

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