Over the last several months I've changed my opinions on open source any number of times. I like to think I'm not just being fickle and instead it's market dynamics that are shifting focus and opinion.
I was recently quoted in an article about open-source "leeches", and in many situations I stand behind the comments. As it turns out, one of the companies I mentioned is now paying, though many others are still not. Freeloaders will always be part of the open-source game, and I think we all accept that, even if it gets under your skin occasionally. At this point, I don't really care--I'd rather see more unpaid open source than expensive proprietary software in use.
In the past I've had bewildering conversations with CIOs and VPs where they told me that they wouldn't contribute code back because they had "created IP--why would we give it to you for free?" while generating hundreds of millions of dollars on top of open-source software that someone, somewhere had given to them for free. I guess that's the sticking point. Not the freeloading, but the assumption that what they created is somehow more valuable than the product that they built on top of.
This brings up a whole world of issues for those trying to build open source companies. Lately, I'm becoming less convinced that you can build a pure-play open source company if you don't fall into two broad categories: direct replacements or inventions.
... Read MoreAs we try to figure out the future of the cloud, one thing is assured: developers will drive both deployment and consumption approaches. As is common to so many other major software shifts, developers lead, regardless of what vendors want the market to look like.
With the exception of Amazon.com and Google, neither of which are IT stalwarts, there hasn't been much to write home about from the obvious big vendors. IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft have all made proclamations, with only Microsoft offering much in the way of a system to test-drive, let alone deploy.
In the past, Microsoft could show up late to a party and still win. That's becoming harder to do, as it's forced to compete on so many fronts. Despite a vast developer army, Microsoft's efforts have been highly confusing and occasionally nonsensical. Microsoft needs developers to win in the cloud.
But Ubuntu, with legions of developers and more than 10 million users, has substantial market power to shift the cloud into entirely different directions.
As fellow CNET blogger James Urquhart pointed out, Ubuntu now has "cloud computing" inside.
- Ubuntu server will start promoting cloud computing through entirely open-source software.
- For those wishing to manage clouds, Ubuntu will apparently contain tools that leverage the Amazon APIs
- Canonical will create standard Amazon Machine Images from Karmic Koala, essentially creating "ready to run" appliances that will serve as "standard builds" to the Amazon community.
- The Eucalyptus project out of UC Santa Barbara will soon be included in every install package.
When I last spoke with Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth, he mentioned that he had no interest in being a cloud provider. His take was that everyone should have the ability to choose the shape, size, and vendor (including internal compute clouds via Eucalyptus) of their cloud efforts, and by integrating these tools into Ubuntu, he's helped to take that first step.
Much the way Amazon has become the default standard for cloud deployment, Ubuntu's approach could very easily become the de facto developer standard. Odds are that vendors that favor open approaches--IBM, Dell, and Sun will be amenable to this, but it's hard to see Microsoft or ultraconservative companies like SAP hop on board. Of course, if they don't, they could easily miss the ride.
You can follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
Without a doubt, the cloud and all its forms and meanings were big news in 2008. Besides the huge growth of Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, we saw Salesforce launch Force.com, a true platform-as-a-service.
My picks for the most interesting software of 2008 are Hadoop and Eucalyptus.
Hadoop is an Apache project, the "open source implementation of MapReduce, a powerful tool designed for the detailed analysis and transformation of very large data sets," which basically means you can process a ton of data on commodity hardware.
Hadoop is going commercial through Cloudera and while details are not publicly available, let's just say there are some very important and interesting foundations being laid for the way that people deal with computing and processing power.
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Eucalyptus started out in the research labs at UCSB about a year ago but the coding. It's part of an NSF funded project called V-Grads. The goal of V-Grads is to create a software infrastrucure that gives Grid and grid-like programs a uniform execution target regardless of how the resources are managed.
Every year the Eucalyptus team demos how the applications are managed across Grids and cluster and this year they were slated to demo on Amazon EC2. In that process they realized that the software would allow them to basically create their own EC2 (in addition to being able to manage EC2 itself.)
Eucalyptus is architected to treats nodes as resources and each processing task is divided into per-resource components. There is a web services component on each head node and on each cluster node. The Eucalyptus Cloud Controller interacts with the Clouds to manage the resources.
With the students flowing back to campus Wolski said they are planning a 6-8 week major re-factoring in order to solidify the internals. All interfaces will remain the same so there should be minimal impact on existing users and developers.
All of the project contributors are part of the V-grads programs and there are some random other developers that are interested--also in academia. So far there haven't been any code contributions from other parties.
With the Cloud market so new, the UCSB team hasn't yet decided what they are going to do yet in terms of just keeping it as a project or pursuing a commercial endeavor. Regardless they plan to keep developing Eucalyptus as part of their academic pursuits.
One idea that Rich and I discussed was the idea that Eucalyptus could be used to build you a "thing" that looks like whatever Cloud infrastructure you like and then you could deploy it internally. And once you are running a Eucalyptus based Cloud internally you could then manage other Cloud resources from your enterprise and decide what components cross the firewall.
I saw a press release this morning from a company called Elastra who announced support for the Eucalyptus open source project.
Eucalyptus --Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems - is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters.
ELASTRA Corporation, the leading provider of software for configuring, deploying and managing complete application systems in public and private compute clouds, today announced Elastra Cloud Server support for the Eucalyptus platform.
Eucalyptus is very cool and makes some of the Cloud hype real. But like other open source projects it looks like there are people who are not the developers attempting to monetize the product.
Of course, this is totally OK under the terms of the BSD license and near as I can tell the project is still largely an academic undertaking out of UC Santa Barbara. I just can't understand why Elastra wouldn't at least tell the Eucalyptus team that they were going to do a press release about supporting their product. At a minimum they could have linked to the project site.
I was a little hesitant to jump into this morass, but I think it's clear that open source will power the Cloud. Those who develop the software can decide how to license and monetize, but we should be aware of the implications of consuming open source in the Cloud and how the software may/may not be supported, licensed and warrantied.
This reminds me a lot of a past issue of Rod Johnson vs. OpenLogic. I have to think that Rod wouldn't be too thrilled about Elastra either.
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