IT IS ALWAYS encouraging and very much rewarding to see the impact of Free software expanding to the higher layers/levels in the stack. OpenStack, an Apache-licensed project which may as well be called FreedomStack (but not "OpenCloud"), has just been added to OIN's coverage, protecting it from the likes of SCO now that new trolls (Microsoft- and Apple-backed) arrive at the scene [1].
Am I the only one who’s been having a bit of SCO déjà vu when it comes to Rockstar’s suit against Google and a bevy of Android handset makers?
You remember SCO, don’t you? They’re the company, once a major Linux player with the Caldera distro, that bought the rights to Unix then turned around and sued IBM for $1 billion, claiming that Big Blue had been copying Unix code into Linux. They’re also the company that sued two of their former clients, AutoZone and Daimler Chrysler, for moving to Linux. Trouble was, they had nothing, not even the copyrights to the code they claimed had been infringed.
eWEEK 30: Unix remains a major server platform in enterprises and on the Internet three decades after PC Week started covering the computer industry.
Red Hat claims that its "enterprise-ready solution combines the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the innovation inherent in Red Hat OpenStack technologies to deliver a scalable and secure foundation for building an open private or public cloud."
Dreamhost has emerged in recent years to become one of the world's most popular shared hosting providers. The company is now expanding its lineup with new cloud compute and storage services, leveraging the open-source OpenStack platform serving as the foundation. Helping to fuel Dreamhost's expansion is a new $30 million round of financing.
The difference between these two cloud giants is that everything OpenStack does, it does in the open. All of our successes and failures are in the open. So, we must beware to believe the OpenStack processes cannot support growth beyond the core IaaS feature set. If we do, we fail to grow OpenStack’s own portfolio of features, and we risk quickly becoming irrelevant as Amazon continues its proprietary quest for cloud market domination and saturation. In order to have a competitive open source offering for building clouds, both public and private—we need to add new services and features to the OpenStack portfolio to mature and stabilize the 'core' projects.
VIDEO: HP Distinguished Engineer Monty Taylor explains how the open-source OpenStack cloud platform is moving forward.
There are many hundreds of developers who contribute code to the open-source OpenStack cloud platform. For the recent OpenStack Havana release, the top developer as measured by the volume of code commits was Monty Taylor, distinguished engineer at Hewlett-Packard.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Taylor explains what he actually does at HP and how his team is contributing to making OpenStack the best it can be.
Internap Network Services unveiled the beta version of its new OpenStack-driven public cloud, AgileCLOUD. The company claims it's the first cloud platform that "will fully expose both virtualized and bare-metal compute instances over a native OpenStack API and delivers significant performance, interoperability and flexibility benefits."
Oracle has started sponsoring an open-source cloud tech that it already uses within its commercial offerings, as the company tentatively embraces a market it once reckoned inconsequential.
The company announced on Tuesday that it had become a "Corporate Sponsor" of the OpenStack Foundation, following El Reg reporting in September that the company's new public cloud was partly based on the software.
Of course, Oracle has spilled a bit of open source bad blood in recent years so when it says it embraces an open source standard, it's not as though the open source community jumps up and down with glee about it. It's more likely that the OpenStack community is more than pleased to see Oracle join the party, but they may wonder if the hardware giant has some ulterior motives, rightly or not.
Debate continues to swirl over whether OpenStack has emerged as a successful cloud computing platform in terms of actual deployments, or whether it is overhyped and immature. Earlier this month, we reported on survey results from The OpenStack Foundation that showed that many enterprises are deploying or plan to deploy the platform.