Very interesting market play. I’m speculating that they are betting on “viral marketing” to propel them into becoming the 800 pound guerrilla in this domain. If enough geeks and hacks dive-in, we may be looking at the next Tomcat/Apache…
… July -19 – 2010
NASA and Rackspace Open Up the Cloud
Posted by meggebrecht in Rackspace, OpenStack, Nebula, NASA, Lew Moorman, Jim Curry, Cloud Computing, Chris Kemp
Rackspace announced Monday that it is open-sourcing its cloud computing platform, making a bid to bring some sorely needed interoperability to the cloud with the launch of the OpenStack project.
First up is the software behind the company’s cloud storage engine, Rackspace Cloud Files. You can freely download early code at the OpenStack site under the Apache 2.0 license — meaning of course that you can do pretty anything you want with the code. The full release is expected in mid-September, according to the site.
In mid-October, Rackspace will release OpenStack Compute, code based on its Cloud Servers technology and the Nebula platform operated by NASA, which is partnering with Rackspace on the project.
So basically, anyone will be able to download the software behind two massive cloud computing platforms and build their own. And NASA and Rackspace have pledged that their engineers will continue to develop the technology — they kind of have to, considering that both organizations will be powering their clouds using OpenStack. Rackspace also says that it will commit money and manpower to supporting enterprise and service provider adoption of OpenStack….
Joe Kolakowski 