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."

Great news,

[Superken7]

are you watching, Oracle?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they'll probably end up buying it and ruining it.

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[MareLooke]

Oculos habent sed non vident, aures habent sed non audiunt.

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[QuantumRiff]

Are you watching, Amazon?

There, fixed that for you..

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[Lunix Nutcase]

Yep and Larry is yawning with boredom and goes back to having his threesome on a pile of thousand dollar bills.

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[Lunix Nutcase]

Yes my mom is a slut. Your point?

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[oakgrove]

Why is this not +5 informative?

Re:Buzzword translation needed

[Canazza]

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.

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[Jawnn]

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.

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[petermgreen]

"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

Well done Rackspace

[epiphani]

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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[Monkius]

Strongly agree. This should be a big help.

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[jiteo]

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.

I don't understand, could you provide a car analogy?

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[burris]

It's easy when you are a distant second or third in the market.

this is great news

[esme]

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.

OpenStack vs. OpenNebulae?

[kbonin]

Honest question, have found only a few useful comments online. Has anyone else not already committed to either deployed both and compared?

Open Source or free software?

[sea4ever]

These are two different movements, I would hope that it is of the 'free software' movement...slashdot always uses the wrong terms..

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[firewrought]

These are two different movements

No, it's more like two different theologies for the same faith. Most adherents don't really care about the nit-picky distinctions, but the more orthodox branch (FSF) wastes a lot of energy over it. What's ironic is that having a diversity of approaches to a common goal can be a really good thing (put HURD joke here, for instance), but the leadership usually sees it as threatening (this is a really common problem for social movements, actually).

So this is why RedHat jumped

[1_brown_mouse]

Buying Gluster moves them in with OpenStack.

Committing to an open structure makes it so RedHat buys Gluster.

Beneficial all around.

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[BitZtream]

Its far more likely Redhat bought Gluster to eventually pull it away from OpenStack, since you know ... Redhat has directly competing products with OpenStack, its not likely they'll be putting a lot of money into developing for OpenStack ... it would in fact, be rather stupid for them from a business perspective.

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[markus o'farkus]

Since when is Gluster an OpenStack project? Gluster is merely one way people can store their EBS volumes. I expect plain old iSCSI to be one of the most common ways. Or you can use gluster, or ceph. None of these are official OpenStack projects.

And if you look at the feature set and roadmap of HekaFS (a Red Hat project which rides on top of gluster) it's pretty clear that if anything Red Hat will guide the development of gluster in ways that will make it even more suitable for an OpenStack deployment th