lved, and have the requisite legal protections. In almost all cases, these new entities, called Open-Source Foundations, were nonprofit organizations (with notable exception, Mozilla's search engine partnership with Google). The first of these organiza- tions was the Free Software Foundation (FSF) founded in 1985, which was intended to support the GNU project and its enormous library of open-source software. The GNU project software initially was meant to be its own operating system but eventually provided much of the software needed to establish the Linux operating system (officially referred to as GNU/Linux.) The FSF, the Apache Foundation's growth starting with the Apache web server, and the growth of the Linux Foundation around Linux and the Linux Foundation's Collaborative Projects initia- tive, all provided motivation to the people originally working on the OpenStack project to create a similar federated foundation. IBM, AT&T, and a few other entities along with Rackspace, actively sought for it to become a separate foundation of its own. OpenStack had an advantage, both in technical terms and in terms of marketing and planning elaborate summits, over other single-ven- dor or smaller community-backed solutions of 2012, like Nimbula, Eucalyptus, and OpenNebula. These alternative have eventually faded in the shadow of OpenStack. The "federated" plugin model of OpenStack, which leverages the phenomena espoused by Netscape and by UNIX previously, has been a key to OpenStack's success. It provides a way for vendors with proprietary and open solutions to integrate within a standard infrastructure orchestration framework. In the end, differ- ent than traditional standards bodies, OpenStack has provided a pathway which creates a de facto "open" standard, implemented in by code that is provisioned, for items such as storage and virtual machines, where the proprietary vendors had no desire to work towards a standard. ODL project and its foundation provides the same "federated" benefits to the SDN space as OpenStack d