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Which Cloud System Is the Most Open?
1sockchuck writes "In a landscape with dueling open clouds, which is the most open? Cloud software specialist Eucalyptus sees pushing boundaries of openness as an opportunity. 'We're extending our open model into professional services,' said CEO Marten Mickos. 'Anyone can look at the source code, training material, documents that go around the code, everything. We realize that our competitors will look at it, but we're happy to offer it to the world in order to better the product.' The open cloud arena is becoming more competitive with the growth of OpenStack, CloudStack and OpenNebula, 'There are a number of reasons we are making this shift, but the most important one is culture,' Eucalyptus said in a blog post. 'If we truly are an open source company, does it make sense for us to develop closed-source intellectual property, tightly control access to that information, and use it primarily as a way to drive direct business unit revenue?' What lies ahead in the Open Cloud Wars?"
Oh the irony here... um... why does Win8 want to have you login to the "Microsoft Cloud" to authenticate you?
BING-Doh! You have just been monetized.
you pay for the service. So it doesn't matter if someone 'steals' your code, as long as you can provide a better service. And by better I mostly mean reliable.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Microsoft has proven to be a trustworthy company since the 70s.
some unclaimed clouds are floating by right now!
There's lots of cloud systems out there serving different purposes. Without the purpose defined this question is useless.
With slashdot's 15+ year history, coming here and reading trolls this transparently bad is frankly an insult. Whoever wrote this should be ashamed. Is this your very first troll? Did you just discover this site and say "hey this looks easy, I'm not even going to try"? Please.
Your OwnCloud is.
http://owncloud.org/
-americamatrix
It doesn't matter how "open" the cloud is. If you don't hold it, you don't own it. You can only make educated guesses as to what the future will hold for that company and your data.
For example, just look at MegaUpload. If you stored stuff in "the cloud" using it, its now gone for good. Prior to January 2012, there was no indication that it would become unusable, no warning to back up files or anything.
I think the point of an "open" cloud is that you can pick up your code and data and move somewhere else without any problem. Amazon offers a lot of great functionality with their cloud environment and a rich API to control it, but any company that takes advantage of it is screwed if Amazon prices them out or decides they don't want to be in the cloud provider business anymore.
One of the reasons I went with OpenNebula a while back instead of Eucalyptus is the third-party modules (i.e. VMWare) were open source in OpenNebula and proprietary in Eucalyptus. Granted it's been over a year since I looked so they may have changed that.
Cumulous, I think. This is because they tend to build vertically, leaving space one from another.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That is the cloud you operate yourself. You have less control over anything else and there's no reason not to do this.
Except for price, convenience, time, maintenance, reliability, expertise...
For most people, "less control" is a worthwhile tradeoff.
No one's got in-house talent for everything. If you're a media company, are you really going to do a better job of putting together a cloud to host your stuff than a dedicated cloud provider does?
Do you fix your own car and cook your own food? Did you BUILD your own car and GROW your own food? Do you understand comparative advantage at all?
Please cite and example of a cloud service where this has become an actual problem.
I'm unaware of any cloud files storage service that locks you in such that you can't move to another. They all let you download your files (they'd be fairly useless if they didn't!).
Thx for the comment. I'd say the right to fork prevents the bad things from happening. If you are ever displeased with what the steward of an open source project is doing with it (be it Eucalyptus or something else), you can take the source code and fork it. Happens all the time (OpenOffice, MySQL, Android, etc.).
I'd say that forking is an order of magnitude (or perhaps 2) easier than creating the product in the first place. Forking is hard work. But creating a product from scratch is enormously harder.
The creators and owners have the right to decide on the roadmap of their creation. Closed source software can't deal with disagreements, but open source software can. If you don't like the roadmap, you can create your own branch or your own fork. You don't have to make use of that freedom, but it is a freedom nevertheless, available to all.