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The Ceph Foundation

The Linux Foundation fund that pays for Ceph’s events, test infrastructure and documentation; since 2026 the Linux Foundation also holds the Ceph trademark, while a community steering committee runs the code.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux FoundationWebsite

What it is

The Ceph Foundation is a directed fund of the non-profit Linux Foundation, launched on November 12, 2018 at Ceph Day Berlin with 31 founding members, among them Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE, Intel, DigitalOcean, OVH and CERN. It replaced the Ceph Advisory Board, formed in 2015, and hosts one project, the Ceph distributed storage system. Its job, in the words of its charter, is to “raise, budget and spend funds” for Ceph: member dues pay for events such as Cephalocon and Ceph Days, the project’s test and build infrastructure, and in 2026 a technical writer for the documentation. In October 2026 it had 26 members: four Diamond (45Drives, Bloomberg, Clyso and IBM), two Platinum (GoDaddy and Western Digital), one Gold, eight Silver and eleven Associate members such as CERN and UC Santa Cruz.

For someone choosing Ceph, the foundation’s main promise is that no company owns the name. That was only half true until recently: even as amended in February 2026, the foundation’s charter said “Ceph” and its logo were trademarks of Red Hat, which had bought Inktank, the company Ceph’s creator Sage Weil founded, in 2014, and whose Ceph team moved to IBM in 2023. In 2026 Ceph became a series of LF Projects, LLC under a technical charter, and by September 2026 the trademark had moved from IBM and Red Hat to the Linux Foundation.

The foundation doesn’t decide what goes into Ceph. Its documentation says it “has no direct control over the technical direction” beyond giving feedback; that belongs to the Ceph Steering Committee (CSC). In practice Ceph’s developers still come mostly from one company: of the 39 people on the CSC in October 2026, 26 listed Red Hat or IBM email addresses.

Its projects in this catalog

CephOpen sourceA distributed storage cluster that serves S3 buckets, block devices and a file system from the same pool of disks.

In depth

Membership tiers#

Members must also belong to the Linux Foundation, which charges its own dues. Fees are from the charter amended on February 24, 2026; member counts from the foundation’s membership landscape on October 22, 2026.

TierYearly fee, over 200 employeesYearly fee, 200 or fewerGoverning BoardMembers, October 2026
Diamond$100,000$80,000One seat each4
Platinum$50,000$40,000One seat each2
Gold$30,000$24,000Two seats elected by Gold members1
Silver$15,000$10,000One seat, chosen by the board8
AssociateFreeFreeOne seat, chosen by the board11
  • Associate membership is for pre-approved non-profits, open-source projects and government bodies. The Ceph Steering Committee also holds one vote on the board.

How the money is managed#

No company or group of related companies may have more than one representative on the Governing Board. The board approves a budget by November 15 each year, must approve every expenditure in advance (the chair and treasurer can sign off emergencies and items up to $5,000 within an approved budget category), and must keep a reserve of twice the highest yearly fee, $200,000, which only a two-thirds vote can touch. The Linux Foundation holds the money and takes 9% of the first $1 million raised each year and 6% above that.

The charter also requires a public quarterly update and at least two meetings a year with the CSC. The 2026 updates give an idea of the scale: hosting at OVHcloud cost $5,000 to $10,000 a month over the previous year, more than half of it for four 10 TB storage volumes; the foundation took on two full-time staff, one of them a technical writer; and by September 2026 it was above its minimum reserve and considering paying for lab hardware and a 2027 conference. In 2026 the board also started posting recordings of its meetings on YouTube.

Who runs the code#

Ceph’s technical charter, adopted on February 12, 2026, makes it “Ceph a Series of LF Projects, LLC”, the usual legal form for Linux Foundation projects. New code is contributed under LGPL-2.1 or LGPL-3.0 with a Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off, contributors keep their copyright, documentation is under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and the trademarks are held by LF Projects or another LF entity.

The CSC governs the project. Rather than seating every maintainer, it chooses its own members by a two-thirds vote, and they may be developers, users or other community members; anyone can attend its meetings without a vote. It elects three co-chairs each year who form the Ceph Executive Council, settle disputes the committee can’t resolve by consensus and represent the project to the foundation’s board; they may not all work for the same company or group of companies. Component team leads, chosen by the council, run day-to-day review, backports and bug triage for each part of Ceph.

Where it came from2004–2026

Ceph began in 2004 as Sage Weil’s research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Weil founded Inktank in 2012 to sell support for it, and Red Hat bought Inktank in 2014, ten years after the first line of Ceph code; Red Hat went on to hold the Ceph trademark. A Ceph Advisory Board was formed in 2015.

In November 2018 the Linux Foundation launched the Ceph Foundation as the Advisory Board’s successor, with 31 founding members, to “organize and distribute financial contributions in a coordinated, vendor-neutral fashion”. Its FAQ promised that Ceph would keep developing “according to its own road maps and timetables”. The trademark stayed with Red Hat, and when Red Hat’s storage team moved to IBM at the start of 2023, the company behind most of Ceph’s development changed but the arrangement did not.

In September 2025 the foundation began what it called fully onboarding into the Linux Foundation. Over the first months of 2026 the CSC adopted a technical charter, the foundation’s own charter was amended, and the trademark policy passed to LF Projects; the trademark itself moved from IBM and Red Hat to the Linux Foundation by September 2026, which the foundation described as the completion of its integration.

Why it’s built this way

Money and code kept apart
The foundation was meant to pool companies’ money without giving them control of the roadmap, so the board funds events and infrastructure while technical decisions stay with the community.
A steering committee that picks its own members
The bylaws define leadership by responsibility rather than prestige or seniority, so the CSC may add developers, users or other community members by a two-thirds vote instead of seating everyone with commit rights.
Move the trademark to the Linux Foundation
The foundation said vendor-neutral ownership is a sign of maturity that adopters look for, and that the name should follow how Ceph is run today rather than the company that created it.

Timeline

  1. 2004

    Sage Weil starts Ceph as research at UC Santa Cruz

  2. 2014

    Red Hat acquires Inktank, the company Weil founded to support Ceph

  3. 2015

    Ceph Advisory Board formed

  4. 2018

    Ceph Foundation launches on November 12 at Ceph Day Berlin with 31 founding members

  5. 2023

    Red Hat’s Ceph team and product move to IBM

  6. 2025

    Foundation begins fully onboarding into the Linux Foundation in September

  7. 2026

    Technical charter adopted in February; trademark moves to the Linux Foundation by September

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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