Which Cloud System Is the Most Open? 70
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?"
Re:Not Them (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
In the cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Eucalyptus openness (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The canonical answer is: your own. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.