Citrix has parted ways with OpenStack – the increasingly popular open source project for building Amazon-like "infrastructure clouds" – moving its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation.

When OpenStack was founded in the summer of 2010 by NASA and Rackspace, Citrix was one of the first outfits to join the effort. But a year later, its role in the project was thrown into doubt when it acquired Cloud.com, a company that had built a similar piece of (mostly) open source software. Citrix remained a part of the OpenStack effort, and CloudStack – the code that originated with Cloud.com – was rolled into the OpenStack code tree. But the two platforms were never fully integrated, and on Tuesday, Citrix made a clean break with OpenStack, announcing that it will now open source CloudStack under the aegis of the Apache Foundation.

According to Citrix, CloudStack will become a full open source project at Apache under the Apache 2.0 license. "Our proposed contribution makes a very clear statement that this is going to be governed and led in a truly democratic, open source fashion as is mandated by the Apache Foundation governance structure," Sameer Dholakia, general manager of cloud platforms at Citrix, tells Wired. But no doubt, Citrix will continue to be the main contributor to the code for the foreseeable future.

But clearly, Citrix wants to build momentum behind its own project rather than OpenStack, which already has the suport of such names as Dell, HP, Japanese giant NTT Data, and AT&T. Citrix is now competing with OpenStack as well as longtime rival VMware, which offers a proprietary platform – vCloud – that operates much like OpenStack and CloudStack.

All of these are platforms that let you build your own version of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, the massively popular web service that provides instant access to virtual servers. With OpenStack or CloudStack or vSphere, you could serve up a service to the world at large, as Amazon does, or you could build an "infrastructure cloud" solely for use within your own company.

From the beginning, OpenStack was billed as a truly open source platform that would not be controlled by a single company. NASA supplied the code that mimicked EC2. Rackspace provided the code that mimicked S3, Amazon's complimentary storage service. And the board of the project included representatives from several companies.

The project's democratic mission was called into question when Rackspace acquired Anso Labs – the small company that had built NASA's Nova code – giving it a majority of the board seats. But Rackspace soon rejigged the project's governance model, ceding control to a larger community.

Citrix indicates that it moved to Apache at least in part because it chaffed at the politics surrounding OpenStack. Dholakia mentions a "lack of political appetite" on the part of Citrix. But in the end, he says, it came down to "real and material technology gaps" between the two software platforms that were still a year or two from being bridged.

Citrix indicates that OpenStack's code wasn't as mature as CloudStack. And some agree. "OpenStack is a highly immature platform (it’s unstable and buggy and still far from feature-complete, and people who work with it politely characterize it as “challenging”), but CloudStack is, at this point in its evolution, a solid product," Lydia Leong, an analyst with research outfit Gartner, wrote recently. "Taking a stable, featureful base, and adding onto it, is far easier for an open-source community to do than trying to build complex software from scratch."

"This has to be designed from the ground up for true Amazon architecture," Dholakia says, noting some 30,000 community members already on CloudStack. "We think the market is now."

Rackspace says that it's very supportive of the Apache Foundation, but it adds that while OpenStack has adopted many of Apache's code collaboration procedures, the project puts great focus on the downstream developer community to strengthen the code itself. "For us, it's about getting a community together," Jonathan Bryce, Rackspace Cloud co-founder, tells Wired. "It's much broader than just being about a piece of software that's open sourced."

Citrix's donation also raised their status within the Apache community to a platinum sponsor. Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! also sponsor Apache Software Foundation.