Hi everyone (cross-posting), Yesterday Citrix announced that it sold its CloudPlatform business to Accelerite from Persistent Systems [1]
As you know CloudPlatform is Citrix’s commercial distribution of Apache CloudStack. I wanted to share a few thoughts on what this means for CloudStack. One of the core tenet of the Apache Software Foundation is non-affiliation to companies, as such all of us on these lists participate and contribute to CloudStack as individuals. While the majority of us who are contributing daily to CloudStack are actually doing it as part of our day jobs we still voice our opinions as individuals and companies do not (and should not) have influence on what we do. This is one of the things that makes ASF great. This is also one of the reasons why the ASF and us as a project will not comment on this announcement. It is Citrix’s business, not ours. That said, Citrix gave CloudStack to the ASF back in 2012 and contributed heavily in the early days to its development and maintenance. We should be thankful to Citrix for donating this software and helping the community grow. Giving it to the ASF was also the move that allows us to keep on going like “business” as usual. We as a project do not depend on Citrix. Hence Citrix selling its CloudPlatform business does not change our day to day. Over the years it is fair to say that Citrix involvement through the many individuals participating on these lists as diminished, with the vast majority of the work now carried on by others. If we were to do a ASF “faux-pas” and actually check affiliation of the folks that are doing most of the development and release work, we would see other companies than Citrix. Companies offering CloudStack services but also and mostly CloudStack users, a few doing it as a hobby and most because their company uses it. This is open source at its core, folks using a software, loving it, loving their peers, and contributing back for the benefit of everyone. It is impossible for me to say what Accelerite will do, I have had no contact with them so far and did not know this sale was coming. Neither do I know what will happen to all the fine Citrix engineers that were still working on CloudStack. Whatever they do, I wish them the best and thank them for the dedication to our project over the years. Early indication from the press release seems to indicate that Accelerite will engage with us. If they do, we will welcome them like any contributors to an ASF project. With openness, transparency and respect (the Apache way). I do want to mention that I think this may be an opportunity for CloudStack. Observers might think that our project is dead because of Citrix selling its business, but they would be mis-informed about the nature of ASF projects. I actually believe the contrary and think this will be a time where more users and potentially companies will engage more actively. They will see that the route to a successful Cloud is through engaging and becoming part of our community. They will also finally stop thinking that CloudStack is a Citrix product and that might be the kicker that brings them on board. Finally, being a technical guy, I like to focus on technical things. We have done some great strides over the past 8 months, we have stabilized CloudStack and are now releasing faster than ever, we have dockerized, we have pluginized, we have had several events... In september we will go to Brazil for CCC. Brazil is seeing a huge growth in CloudStack adoption. We still have a ton to do, from removing technical debt, fixing security issues, improving packaging, making CloudStack ever more easier to develop and use. This has not changed. We have some very important discussions going on around LTS and GitHub hosting. If anything I think the container movement is a bigger threat to our project than Citrix’s announcement. As companies start to embrace the container ecosystem and building containerized applications, what happens to CloudStack ? How does CloudStack work in a container world ? The same question are valid for OpenStack by the way, I just don’t buy into the Magnum effort, but I digress :) So thank you Citrix, we hope to welcome Accelerite and let’s keep on Stacking, [1] https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/01/11/a-new-home-accelerite-to-acquire-cloudplatform/ -Sebastien VP Apache CloudStack
