Free, as in Fear

I have plenty of better things to do than blog right this moment, but having been in the midst of events that generated an inordinate amount of FUD, I just couldn’t contain myself.

NEWSFLASH: AN OPEN SOURCE CLOUD FRAMEWORK ACCEPTS CODE

OpenStack Nova has not stopped supporting anything. Rackspace hasn’t done anything but start contributing code to support their APIs. Considering that Rackspace is actually spending real money to support the project, that seems entirely reasonable. (PROTIP: If a community is going to use an Open Source project to interact with your product, you might want to consider a strategic investment in making that experience a good one. Just Sayin’)

THERE WAS NO STATEMENT, NO CODE, NOTHING WHATSOEVER THAT INDICATED OPENSTACK WOULD REMOVE SUPPORT FOR AWS APIS.

This whole thing started when James Watters (@wattersjames, last seen preparing himself for VMWorld with a platter of carnitas) asked the people at the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing meetup on OpenStack to settle a bet he had with Simon Wardley (@swardley) about the AWS APIs. In passing, it was noted that Nova would support the Rackspace API, but at no time was there any indication that the project would remove the existing AWS support.

@wattersjames proceeded to banter with @swardley in the twitterz, hilarity ensued, and now we are here. (+1 evil genius points to James)

OMFGWTFBBQ, Rackspace is going to implement their APIs in an open source project that they have devoted resources towards. The Clouds are falling.

Aside from people just getting their facts straight because it is the responsible thing to do, OpenStack is far and away one of the most open ‘open source’ projects by design, and definitely when compared with other open source cloud frameworks.

There is a reason there are ~150 people in #openstack on IRC. There is a reason people are submitting patches.

This isn’t because of Rackspace. This is because of how the community has been engaged and the promise of a truly open cloud framework.

There are two other things worth noting for people who haven’t followed this story and can’t be bothered to get the facts straight. First, there are other entities involved in OpenStack, not the least of which is NASA. Maybe you have heard of NASA? I don’t think NASA is in this beholden to Rackspace. OpenStack will evolve in the direction that is a combination of the collective utility of the community and whoever chooses to actually contribute code. Which brings me to the second point, code wins. If you think something should work a certain way, prove it with code.

Next time someone wants to talk about changes in an open source project like OpenStack, please include the revisions and/or patches.

The whole cloud API discussion is ridiculous anyway. All the APIs should be different in a few years. If we are really moving the cloud thing forward, they will be.

Seriously, is there anything left to debate?

Go build something.