Mirantis today announced acceleration of its open source strategy and investment, positioning open source initiatives under a new Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and hiring Randy Bias as vice president, Open Source Strategy and Technology.

The Open Source Program Office will focus on fostering community involvement and engagement through strategic open source projects. Bias will be responsible for ensuring greater transparency in Mirantis’ open source engagement, and providing internal and external reporting to hold Mirantis accountable as a responsible open source citizen.

“Open source has always been the core of Mirantis’ business and the key to delivering transformative cloud technologies that empower our customers with the flexibility to set their own direction,” said Alex Freedland, CEO, Mirantis. “The office, led by Randy, will be dedicated to shaping contributions that matter.”

A veteran of open source and cloud computing, Bias has been involved with several era-defining open source projects and companies. He was an early leader in the OpenStack community, serving as an inaugural director of the OpenStack Foundation (now OpenInfra) and board member from 2012-2014. He also served on the board of Linux Foundation Networking, and led the Tungsten Fabric project that today has evolved to OpenSDN. Bias founded the open cloud computing company Cloudscaling, which was acquired by EMC in 2014 where Bias subsequently drove EMC’s first open source product release.

Mirantis already supports several open source projects (including k0s, k0smotron, and Lagoon), maintains several more, and contributes to Kubernetes, and more.