OpenStack Spun Out From Rackspace Control

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OpenStack Spun Out From Rackspace Control

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 6, 2011 @12:11AM from the they-grow-up-so-fast dept.

angry tapir writes "Responding to the rapid adoption of their software, the folks behind the OpenStack cloud software are planning to form a stand-alone nonprofit foundation to steward future development of the open-source software suite. They will formally announce the foundation at the OpenStack conference, being held this week in Boston. Hosting provider Rackspace, which currently owns the OpenStack trademark and copyrights, plans to transfer ownership of these resources to the not-for-profit foundation once it is operational."

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Great news, by Superken7 · 2011-10-06 00:15 · Score: 1

are you watching, Oracle?
1. Re:Great news, by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 00:21 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, they'll probably end up buying it and ruining it.
2. Re:Great news, by MareLooke · 2011-10-06 00:59 · Score: 1
  
  Oculos habent sed non vident, aures habent sed non audiunt.
3. Re:Great news, by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 01:05 · Score: 0
  
  Not before spreading their logo everywhere.
4. Re:Great news, by QuantumRiff · 2011-10-06 01:18 · Score: 1
  
  Are you watching, Amazon?
  There, fixed that for you..
  
  --
  
  What are we going to do tonight Brain?
5. Re:Great news, by Lunix+Nutcase · 2011-10-06 02:09 · Score: 1
  
  Yep and Larry is yawning with boredom and goes back to having his threesome on a pile of thousand dollar bills.
6. Re:Great news, by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 02:34 · Score: 0
  
  goes back to having his threesome on a pile of thousand dollar bills.
  Your mom says hi. And your wife says get your ass back to work.
  - Larry
7. Re:Great news, by Lunix+Nutcase · 2011-10-06 02:43 · Score: 2
  
  Yes my mom is a slut. Your point?
8. Re:Great news, by oakgrove · 2011-10-06 05:01 · Score: 1
  
  Why is this not +5 informative?
  
  --
  The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Buzzword translation needed by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 00:29 · Score: 0

What's "cloud software"? Is that just another name for Internet host-based services?
1. Re:Buzzword translation needed by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 01:00 · Score: 0
  
  Wet and full of rust...... ah the cloud.
2. Re:Buzzword translation needed by Canazza · 2011-10-06 01:01 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  It's client/server architecture that's rapidly extendible depending on demand. The software that manages and runs it is the Cloud Software. Like this, or Microsoft's Azure platform.
  
  --
  It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
3. Re:Buzzword translation needed by Jawnn · 2011-10-06 01:33 · Score: 1
  
  As used by far too many marketing pukes and trade journal hacks, yes. In reality, however, it is something rather more specific, and in this particular case more than a little bit exciting. Yes, exciting, not because it has the word "cloud" in it, but because of what it actually can do. But then you'd have to actually RTFA and something from at least one other web site to know that.
4. Re:Buzzword translation needed by petermgreen · 2011-10-06 02:48 · Score: 2
  
  "the cloud" is about a paradigm shift in hosting.
  The old fassioned way of doing hosting was that customers/responsibilities were assigned to servers in a manual and largely fixed manner. If you ordered a bigger server (or you ordered a bigger vm and there was no spare room on your host) someone had to manually set up a new server and migrate your installation to it. If a machine died it needed to be fixed ASAP because at worst services would be down and at best redundancy would have been lost.
  "The cloud" is about replacing that manual and largely static allocation with dynamic computer controlled allocation. If a customer wants more capacity they request it in the admin interface. If hardware dies it's no big deal, the customer sees the equivilent of a reboot and new capacity is allocated to them automatically.
  
  --
  note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Well done Rackspace by epiphani · 2011-10-06 00:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

There are very few companies that get it, and you appear to be one of them. First, opensourcing open stack, and now spinning it off as a separate non-profit, you understand that when you build a piece of software for internal use, open-sourcing it will provide you better software. And some good publicity to boot.
So many times have I built internal tools that I thought were far better than the open source equivalents, but we were never allowed to release them. Sure, it's intellectual property - but your product isn't the mountain, it's the ski lift and the course markers. Why not get the best mountain you can, rather than insisting on getting YOUR mountain.

--
.
1. Re:Well done Rackspace by Monkius · 2011-10-06 01:49 · Score: 1
  
  Strongly agree. This should be a big help.
  
  --
  Matt
2. Re:Well done Rackspace by jiteo · 2011-10-06 02:03 · Score: 1
  
  But your product isn't the mountain, it's the ski lift and the course markers. Why not get the best mountain you can, rather than insisting on getting YOUR mountain.
  I don't understand, could you provide a car analogy?
3. Re:Well done Rackspace by burris · 2011-10-06 02:26 · Score: 1
  
  It's easy when you are a distant second or third in the market.
4. Re:Well done Rackspace by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 02:45 · Score: 0
  
  I don't understand, could you provide a car analogy?
  It's cool to drive the soap box on which you attached the wheels all by yourself, but driving a Lamborghini beats that.
this is great news by esme · 2011-10-06 00:46 · Score: 2

i've just started working with openstack recently, and my university is adopting it in a big way. so it's great to see it get a little independence from rackspace. not they had ever done or said anything that had me worried, but any time a project is controlled by a single vendor (whose interests might diverge from mine at any time), it makes me a little worried. so having that resolved make me even happier about working with open stack.
OpenStack vs. OpenNebulae? by kbonin · 2011-10-06 00:56 · Score: 1

Honest question, have found only a few useful comments online. Has anyone else not already committed to either deployed both and compared?
1. Re:OpenStack vs. OpenNebulae? by kirbini · 2011-10-06 02:26 · Score: 0
  
  I"m trying to figure out the same thing right now but throw CloudStack (Citrix) into the mix. From what I can tell they are all IaaS plays with slightly different requirements and philosophies but largely using the same code. OpenStack is the big name and has the most momentum but is also quite immature and difficult to deploy although that is changing rapidly focusing on super large-scale deployments. OpenNebula is a fork of the origina Nebula with it's focus being an easy to use and deploy IaaS stack for enterprises and service providers. Cloudstack seems to fit somewhere in between. From what I can tell it's the most mature of the three in terms of deployability and use. Being a Citrix property it will play nice with XenServer and XenCloudPlatform and is already in use in some very large cloud providers around the world.
  But when it comes to a technical comparison between the three, or finding information useful in helping us decide which cart to hitch our horse to, I"m at a loss. My impression is that eventually each will be its own brand on nearly identical code stacks. Kinda like OpenOffice, Libre Office and IBM's office suite are all forks of the same code base though with less fragmentation. My guess is that any real differentiation will eventually be down to packaging and proprietary add-ons like billing.
  (hopefully this will kick start some real responses to your question. You see, the trick on slashdot is to ask your question in the form of an opinion. Slashdotters will only post to tell you how wrong you are)
Open Source or free software? by sea4ever · 2011-10-06 01:29 · Score: 2

These are two different movements, I would hope that it is of the 'free software' movement...slashdot always uses the wrong terms..
1. Re:Open Source or free software? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 01:48 · Score: 0
  
  This just in: No one gives a fuck.
2. Re:Open Source or free software? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 02:05 · Score: 0
  
  OpenStack is Apache-licensed so, no, it's not part of the Stallmanite movement.
3. Re:Open Source or free software? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 03:12 · Score: 0
  
  Apache 2 license is "free software license" and any project licensed as such can be included in GPL 3 licensed tools. So yes, OpenStack is part of "free software" movement.
4. Re:Open Source or free software? by firewrought · 2011-10-06 06:03 · Score: 1
  
  These are two different movements
  
  No, it's more like two different theologies for the same faith. Most adherents don't really care about the nit-picky distinctions, but the more orthodox branch (FSF) wastes a lot of energy over it. What's ironic is that having a diversity of approaches to a common goal can be a really good thing (put HURD joke here, for instance), but the leadership usually sees it as threatening (this is a really common problem for social movements, actually).
  
  --
  -1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
So this is why RedHat jumped by 1_brown_mouse · 2011-10-06 01:47 · Score: 1

Buying Gluster moves them in with OpenStack.
Committing to an open structure makes it so RedHat buys Gluster.
Beneficial all around.
1. Re:So this is why RedHat jumped by BitZtream · 2011-10-06 05:41 · Score: 2
  
  Its far more likely Redhat bought Gluster to eventually pull it away from OpenStack, since you know ... Redhat has directly competing products with OpenStack, its not likely they'll be putting a lot of money into developing for OpenStack ... it would in fact, be rather stupid for them from a business perspective.
  
  --
  Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
2. Re:So this is why RedHat jumped by markus+o'farkus · 2011-10-06 06:08 · Score: 1
  
  Since when is Gluster an OpenStack project? Gluster is merely one way people can store their EBS volumes. I expect plain old iSCSI to be one of the most common ways. Or you can use gluster, or ceph. None of these are official OpenStack projects.
  And if you look at the feature set and roadmap of HekaFS (a Red Hat project which rides on top of gluster) it's pretty clear that if anything Red Hat will guide the development of gluster in ways that will make it even more suitable for an OpenStack deployment than it is now. They are adding things like multi-tenancy, stronger authentication, encryption etc.
  Personally I'm more excited about ceph, but gluster just got more interesting for OpenStack, not less.
Rackspace Control? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-06 03:16 · Score: 0

This is so pretentious. Why don't you just call it what it is, a bra.
1. Re:Rackspace Control? by kirbini · 2011-10-06 04:42 · Score: 0
  
  It's a Manzier!