Commercial Open Source Software

OpenStack is getting more and more attention…

Dana Blankenhorn few days ago wrote an article saying that RackSpace maybe the next open source winner. Is he right? Let’s have a quick look at RackSpace’s OpenStack, and how this open source project is evolving before driving any conclusion.

OpenStack is a young open source project written in Python, that despite its youth has a live ecosystem and a very large active development team, seriously working on a better governance model while building the community at an impressive pace.

Canonical’s decision to shift to OpenStack along with the recent news that DreamHost pledges support to OpenStack, are just the last two news we have heard from OpenStack. The discussion about OpenStack and Eucalyptus that MÃ¥rten Mickos and Johannes Ernst had well worth reading.

RackSpace and Eucalyptus are definitely taking two very different paths: RackSpace is spending time and effort to set a new standard, yet involving as many actors as they can (read standardization efforts, community building, creating alliances, etc).

Eucalyptus went for the de-facto standard (Amazon’s AWS), making easier to create private cloud solutions that maybe moved into the wider public cloud. Serving first class customers and get good PRs come first, the community is not yet a major concern.

At the moment the former is more focused on creating the presuppositions for a community-centered ecosystem and the latter on replicating the disruption of the database business in the cloud space.  In the medium/long term we’ll probably see RackSpace work harder on growing its customer base and Eucalyptus nurturing its community.