What is Open Source Cloud? (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Over at Linux.com, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, community evangelist for CloudStack at Citrix, tries to disambiguate the term "cloud". He describes the attributes of clouds, using the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing, looks at the various "X as a service" offerings, how it all works, and why it's important to have open clouds. "Having an open cloud matters because we need to be able to continue the work that GNU and Linux folks have been doing for more than twenty years, at scale. It matters because we need the cloud to be bigger than Amazon or proprietary companies – and because users and organizations should have as much control over their computing destiny at scale as they have had on individual servers."

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What is Open Source Cloud? (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 29, 2013 12:19 UTC (Fri) by psomas (subscriber, #48733) [Link]

"Having an open cloud matters"

I think the term "Open Cloud" is a bit confusing. Open source cloud is what really matters. Open cloud could also mean open cloud standards and APIs, so that you can prevent vendor lock-ins etc. For those interested in open source cloud software, you might also want to take a look at Synnefo. It's an open-source IaaS cloud platform, compliant with the OpenStack APIs, but using a different underlying architecture / design.

What is Open Source Cloud? (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 29, 2013 13:50 UTC (Fri) by zonker (subscriber, #7867) [Link]

Thanks for the comment. It was clear in my head when I put it on paper. (Well, into Vim. Same thing these days...) In the future I'll be sure to be more precise, as I dislike the attempts to claim "openness" simply APIs or whatever. Code still matters.

Open Source Cloud and Open Source Licenses

Posted Mar 30, 2013 9:30 UTC (Sat) by abacus (subscriber, #49001) [Link]

Something that is often overlooked is that open source cloud providers can use modified versions of open source software without being enforced by the GPL to contribute these changes back to the community. Does this mean that more projects should switch from the GPL to the AGPL ?