Rackspace Releases Cloud Stack As Open Source 65
zerocool^ writes "Techcrunch is reporting that Rackspace is open-sourcing their cloud computing technologies, under the name OpenStack. Rackspace has chosen to release under the Apache 2.0 license. The initial release encompasses the cloud object storage and cloud virtual server management suites. Along with this release, NASA is contributing technology from its Nebula Cloud Platform. Early partners include Intel, Dell, and Citrix."
Good licence, has anti-swpat clause (Score:5, Insightful)
Among the permissive licences, Apache 2.0 has the best patent retaliation clause:
If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Re:All up in the Cloud. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of little boxes with AMD and Intel chips. No more big iron. That is the dream.
As I understand it, Rackspace Cloud simply allows one to automatically provision virtual machines for applications in a simple and automatic manner. It is still up to the application to maintain synchronization between multiple instances and plan for failovers in case one of the servers goes down. So, unless the application has been specifically written for a "cloud" environment, the cloud is no more reliable than a single server. Deploying to the cloud won't make your application magically more scalable or fault tolerant.
Many "big iron" applications assume hardware that's very reliable. As such, they'd require significant changes to allow them to run in a cloud environment, where there are no such guarantees. For this reason alone, many corporations will stick with their mainframes.