Slashdot Mirror
OpenStack Spun Out From Rackspace Control
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."
are you watching, Oracle?
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.
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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.
Honest question, have found only a few useful comments online. Has anyone else not already committed to either deployed both and compared?
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.
These are two different movements, I would hope that it is of the 'free software' movement...slashdot always uses the wrong terms..
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.
Buying Gluster moves them in with OpenStack.
Committing to an open structure makes it so RedHat buys Gluster.
Beneficial all around.
"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