For Mirantis, open source isn’t just a licensing choice—it’s a foundational philosophy. In this interview, Mirantis CTO Shaun O’Meara, laid out why the company is releasing k0rdent into open source and how that decision is enabling adoption, interoperability, and community-driven innovation.

“Open source is key to adoption,” said O’Meara. “It’s key to people feeling comfortable with using systems and preventing lock-in.”

Mirantis has long operated in the cloud infrastructure space, but O’Meara acknowledged the company had at one point drifted from its open roots. That’s changed. With projects like k0rdent and Rockoon (an OpenStack operator), Mirantis is reaffirming its commitment to openness, standards, and developer freedom.

“The core infrastructure software that we run our world on needs to be open. That’s to give people optionality, to ensure that we can compose systems as needed,” O’Meara said.

And the company is putting action behind its words. k0rdent is now fully open source. Meanwhile, Rockoon runs on top of k0rdent and brings OpenStack-as-Kubernetes into the picture—giving developers flexibility to mix legacy and modern infrastructure under a common, open framework.

Another major milestone: k0s (Mirantis’ lightweight Kubernetes distribution, pronounced “k-zero-s”) was recently accepted by the Kairos Project as one of its default Kubernetes options. This signals growing cross-pollination within the CNCF sandbox and reinforces Mirantis’ strategy of aligning with upstream communities rather than controlling architecture.

“We believe that people need to have control of their own destiny, and that’s what open source brings,” O’Meara added.

Looking ahead, Mirantis plans to donate more technologies into CNCF and other Linux Foundation-led communities. Their goal? Build open, standardized systems that scale—and evolve—without locking users into proprietary pathways.

“We believe in collaboration of architecture, not dictating it,” said O’Meara.