Katherine, Thanks for your enquiry — it's interesting to see Rackspace positioning themselves as "the open cloud company" rather than "the open *source* cloud company".
Cloud computing is essentially the migration from information technology products to services, in the same way that we migrated from electricity as a product (generators) to a service (grid) over a century ago. In a world of products it was possible to use software licenses to ensure certain freedoms were maintained for both users and vendors — as such, open source finds a business-friendly happy medium between free and proprietary software. In a world of services however (it's important to differentiate between cloud services, like the Rackspace Cloud, and cloud products or "enablers" like OpenStack), one must turn to open standards. This applies to both formats and interfaces, as there's no point having unfettered access to opaque data, nor no access to transparent data... in order to ensure portability and interoperability you need programmatic access to data in a format you can understand. Attempts to adapt open source licenses to a services world by plugging the "service provider loophole" with licenses like the Affero General Public License have been met with limited success, which is ultimately why we formed the Open Cloud Initiative and tackled the problem from a new angle. While an interoperable open source implementation is a (somewhat contentious) requirement of the Open Cloud Principles<http://www.opencloudinitiative.org/principles>, a product or service need not be open source to be considered "open cloud". There are certainly many benefits associated with open source software (some of which were covered in the report), and a vendor who provides their source could be considered "more open", however it is not necessary to be considered "open enough" for the freedoms we considered important during our community consensus process. It follows, for example, that being able to modify your cloud management platform allows you to be more innovative. Removing the licensing component from your budget can also be more cost effective, provided you don't have to invest more time to make it all work. However, were there common, open formats and interfaces between OpenStack and a proprietary cloud stack then many of the same freedoms (freedom from vendor lock-in in particular) would be adequately protected. On the Open Cloud Initiative itself, we have been fairly quiet recently as we've developed the Open Cloud Principles some time ago and are now awaiting products, services and standards to certify as compliant. We're not a Standards Development Organisation (SDO) nor an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), so until such time as the industry delivers work for consideration by the community there's little for us to do beyond advocating the adoption of the principles themselves. I expect 2013 to be a big year for open cloud so you'll be hearing more from us in future. Kind regards, Sam Johnston President, Open Cloud Initiative On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Katherine Noyes <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Shanley, > > I'm a writer with the Linux Foundation's Linux.com, and am working on a > story today about a survey report released by Rackspace UK last month that > found that use of the open cloud boosts innovation: > > http://www.rackspace.co.uk/media-centre/news/article/article/open-source-cloud-boosts-innovation-says-three-quarters-of-respondents-rackspace-research-reveals/ > > I was wondering if you or someone else at the Open Cloud Initiative might > be willing to comment briefly via email about this finding? > I'm interested in any thoughts you might have about whether this rings > true, and why, along with (optionally) any suggestions you might have as to > how companies can maximize this benefit to their innovativeness. > > My deadline is tomorrow, Tuesday Jan. 22, at 1 pm Eastern US time. > Hope to hear from you! > Thanks so much, > - Katherine. > > Katherine Noyes > Linux.com > 501-513-1092 > [email protected] > See my recent stories: > > https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/systems-management/682976-7-top-linux-trends-of-2012 > - > > https://www.linux.com/news/hardware/desktops/679646-6-linux-distros-born-in-2012 > > https://www.linux.com/news/hardware/desktops/676486-raspberry-pi-one-of-the-top-linux-innovations-of-2012 > > https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/cloud-computing/673351-eucalyptus-32-adds-self-service-capabilities-to-open-cloud-platform > > >
