Selling support for open source projects that you don't own or contribute to
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.
Further in the release there is a quote that mentions Mule. I selfishly contacted the Eucalyptus team to see how they were using Mule, only to find out that they hadn't seen or been informed of the press release.
I emailed Eucalyptus Project Director Rich Wolski to check again, but best I can tell Elastra hasn't donated any code or helped with the development, they've just decided to monetize the project. I also called Elastra's Stuart Charlton to see how we could all work together but I haven't heard back yet.
From a marketing perspective this whole thing is bizarre--putting out a press release that names multiple open source projects that have various levels of brand awareness but not telling anyone associated with the projects that you are doing so is either poor judgment or a lack of marketing skills.
And I love this backhanded compliment from Stuart Charlton.
"The Eucalyptus team has combined several useful open source technologies, including Mule, VDE, and libvirt, into a compelling service layer," said Stuart Charlton, chief software architect, ELASTRA. "Work still remains to incorporate richer networking, storage and security capabilities, but we look forward to contributing further to building an open cloud ecosystem."
An open cloud ecosystem? Sounds like Elastra is waiting for the Eucalyptus guys to do some more work that they can take for themselves.
Disclosure: my company shares an investor with Elastra. I am sure someone is going to yell at me for this rant.
Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @daveofdoom. 
I think you misunderstood the point of the press release. If you had waited for me to return your phone call before writing this rant, we could have discussed this, but I suppose a little blog drama is fun on a Tuesday morning.
We were announcing that we've enabled the Elastra Cloud Server to _interoperate_ with the Eucalyptus project and are opening up a limited beta program for those who have deployed a test Eucalyptus environment and would like to use our cloud server to provision and manage their MySQL or PgCluster database.
We haven't announced commercial support for the Eucalyptus project. I don't see how you could even interpret this from the press release unless you were an open source vendors afraid someone was going to eat away at your revenue stream (Oh, wait.) It would be very presumptuous for us to offer support considering how early the project is in its life! It primarily is still a UCSB project that has only recently opened up its code base and the project is not really set up for widespread contributions quite yet. What we're saying is, "this is a good idea, and for those interested in using Eucalyptus, we'll work with you".
We really have no interest in monetizing Eucalyptus. We are working to enable interoperability between our software and a variety of virtualization management platforms. Just like when we demonstrate "VMware Support" in the coming weeks, it doesn't mean we're commercially supporting VMware, it means that we have build a service to interoperate with them.
That's what I meant by "ecosystem": there will be many vendors supporting cloud computing, some open source, some SaaS (like us, currently), some closed source. The important thing is that that in the face of a market that has different platforms, APIs, and licensing models, how we foster interoperability.