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Cloud Open Source News

Which Cloud System Is the Most Open? 70

Posted by Soulskill from the does-a-silver-lining-need-gaps-to-be-open dept.
1sockchuck writes "In a landscape with dueling open clouds, which is the most open? Cloud software specialist Eucalyptus sees pushing boundaries of openness as an opportunity. 'We're extending our open model into professional services,' said CEO Marten Mickos. 'Anyone can look at the source code, training material, documents that go around the code, everything. We realize that our competitors will look at it, but we're happy to offer it to the world in order to better the product.' The open cloud arena is becoming more competitive with the growth of OpenStack, CloudStack and OpenNebula, 'There are a number of reasons we are making this shift, but the most important one is culture,' Eucalyptus said in a blog post. 'If we truly are an open source company, does it make sense for us to develop closed-source intellectual property, tightly control access to that information, and use it primarily as a way to drive direct business unit revenue?' What lies ahead in the Open Cloud Wars?"
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Which Cloud System Is the Most Open? More

Which Cloud System Is the Most Open?

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  • In the cloud (Score:5, Insightful)

    by buchner.johannes ( 1139593 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @06:12PM (#42875911) Homepage Journal

    you pay for the service. So it doesn't matter if someone 'steals' your code, as long as you can provide a better service. And by better I mostly mean reliable.

  • Out the window.... (Score:3)

    by kawabago ( 551139 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @06:15PM (#42875935)
    some unclaimed clouds are floating by right now!
    • is that legal? there's no government oversight for where the cloud is going? are they getting offshored? are we losing our clouds to foreign countries?

  • For what purpose? (Score:3)

    by bananaquackmoo ( 1204116 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @06:17PM (#42875951)
    There's lots of cloud systems out there serving different purposes. Without the purpose defined this question is useless.

  • OwnCloud (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @06:27PM (#42876025)

    Your OwnCloud is.

    http://owncloud.org/

    -americamatrix

  • It doesn't matter how "open" the cloud is. If you don't hold it, you don't own it. You can only make educated guesses as to what the future will hold for that company and your data.

    For example, just look at MegaUpload. If you stored stuff in "the cloud" using it, its now gone for good. Prior to January 2012, there was no indication that it would become unusable, no warning to back up files or anything.
    • It seemed to me there was tons of warning if you read the news: MPAA/RIAA had it out for them for months before they got shut down. I predicted their eventual demise months in advance and nobody believed me.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hawguy ( 1600213 )

      It doesn't matter how "open" the cloud is. If you don't hold it, you don't own it. You can only make educated guesses as to what the future will hold for that company and your data.

      For example, just look at MegaUpload. If you stored stuff in "the cloud" using it, its now gone for good. Prior to January 2012, there was no indication that it would become unusable, no warning to back up files or anything.

      I think the point of an "open" cloud is that you can pick up your code and data and move somewhere else without any problem. Amazon offers a lot of great functionality with their cloud environment and a rich API to control it, but any company that takes advantage of it is screwed if Amazon prices them out or decides they don't want to be in the cloud provider business anymore.

  • That is the cloud you operate yourself. You have less control over anything else and there's no reason not to do this.

    • Re:The canonical answer is: your own. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by node 3 ( 115640 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @07:08PM (#42876389)

      That is the cloud you operate yourself. You have less control over anything else and there's no reason not to do this.

      Except for price, convenience, time, maintenance, reliability, expertise...

      For most people, "less control" is a worthwhile tradeoff.

      • Ah, the iOS attitude. It seems like a deal until you realize the difficulty and cost of leaving. *This* is why having an open platform matters.

        • No one's got in-house talent for everything. If you're a media company, are you really going to do a better job of putting together a cloud to host your stuff than a dedicated cloud provider does?

          Do you fix your own car and cook your own food? Did you BUILD your own car and GROW your own food? Do you understand comparative advantage at all?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dbIII ( 701233 )

            If you're a media company

            They are the people that do websites these days, so yes they would do a better job than just about anyone else :)
            I get your point though, a place that sells bathroom fittings or whatever would be better off getting somebody else to put together their "cloud" web presence, but your local phone book will have quite a few people that can do the job. Sticking anything important in a place where you can't handle any fallout using your local legal system is IMHO stupid. Those terms of

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by node 3 ( 115640 )

          Ah, the iOS attitude. It seems like a deal until you realize the difficulty and cost of leaving. *This* is why having an open platform matters.

          What's the cost of leaving? You just download your files (if you haven't already done so) and move on.

          That's *much* cheaper than the cost of doing it yourself if you don't have the spare hardware and have no clue or desire how to even get started, maintain, and secure it. That's why the "iOS attitude" is so popular.

      • Mostly I agree with you but there are real reasons to get another party to host your website (which is pretty well all the "cloud" is, even if it's got webdav type file sharing). If you don't have the bandwidth locally it makes sense, but personally I'd prefer a co-located box or virtual machine somewhere unless it's really trivial. I did it the lazy hosted thing myself for an FTP site when the local network connection was two ADSL lines stuck together giving upload speeds of buggerall. The stuff would t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afgam28 ( 48611 )

        You're right, but it's more than just a tradeoff between inhouse and outsourcing. There are many benefits of cloud computing that you can only get when you share your data center with others, such as:

        * When you're a startup and you don't have much money, and you can't afford the high initial cost of setting up a data center (or many data centers, if you require multi-region redundancy). Even if it costs more, the cloud linearizes the cost of servers which simplifies planning.

        * When I want a new server, I ju

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rs79 ( 71822 )

        I'd love to be able to show you numbers but all I can really do is point out I've done this since 93 and it's worked out really well. And I did read some guys analysis of it and he found it to be cheaper, sorry that's the best I can do.

        Set up a home server. Make it nice. They drop it off at a buddies. Or send the disk image to the other side of the country to a buddy there. Repeat. Now make one more at home and use that. Get a cable and a dsl connection and you'll have better uptime than Google. Add a sat

  • Eucalyptus openness (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dishwasha ( 125561 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @06:39PM (#42876125)

    One of the reasons I went with OpenNebula a while back instead of Eucalyptus is the third-party modules (i.e. VMWare) were open source in OpenNebula and proprietary in Eucalyptus. Granted it's been over a year since I looked so they may have changed that.

    • Re:Eucalyptus openness (Score:4, Interesting)

      by martenmickos ( 467191 ) on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @01:29AM (#42879883)

      We believe in Linux, KVM and Eucalyptus - all production-ready open source software freely available to anyone. Just download and get going. - If you have chosen to use closed source software like VMware's, then as Dishwasha points out there are commercial plug-ins available for Eucalyptus.

      Marten Mickos
      CEO, Eucalyptus Systems

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      I like OpenNebula as well, in part because the setup and installation of nodes is so trivial (the agent is so well implemented). I can turn anything into a node, more or less.

  • My choice (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by maxwell demon ( 590494 )

    I think the most open cloud is this one. [wikipedia.org]

  • Seriously, GIS them. They're awesome.

  • There's an important difference. One that's open to you is likely in-house-reinventing-the-wheel type thing (which I'm not necessarily opposed to), but will likely give you the most options if you've installed locally. After all, you'll be giving yourself those options.

    The Open to Everyone Else is likely built by someone else, maybe lot of other people, and if the Rackspace controversy [gigaom.com] is any hint, you're still at the mercy of the developers and their sponsors. You're still faced with the same problem: Euca

    • Thx for the comment. I'd say the right to fork prevents the bad things from happening. If you are ever displeased with what the steward of an open source project is doing with it (be it Eucalyptus or something else), you can take the source code and fork it. Happens all the time (OpenOffice, MySQL, Android, etc.).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by eksith ( 2776419 )

        This is true, but if I had the resources to fork an existing project, then I may have had the resources to create something myself (with maybe a little extra time/effort) in the beginning as well, no?

        Let's forget the stack for a while... Imagine it's just the OS. Say Ubuntu. Some of the things bundled and some of their decisions lately have been controversial, so if I've been using them for a while and maybe I don't agree with the direction... What now? Do I go with a Ubuntuesque distro that maintained what

        • I'd say that forking is an order of magnitude (or perhaps 2) easier than creating the product in the first place. Forking is hard work. But creating a product from scratch is enormously harder.

          The creators and owners have the right to decide on the roadmap of their creation. Closed source software can't deal with disagreements, but open source software can. If you don't like the roadmap, you can create your own branch or your own fork. You don't have to make use of that freedom, but it is a freedom neverthe

  • There is an arms race between companies like Nebula and Eucalyptus, backed by VCs, as to who can stay in the game long enough to be the defacto clound management environment for companies who want an open alternative to VMWare/Microsoft but need on-premise or have a specific use-case so can't choose EWS or Google.

    Eucalyptus, for all the partner-with-amazon, are loosing market share and shedding staff.
    Nebula are still struggling to get a viable product out of the door.

    (I know senior people in both companies)

  • Why don't RMS & the FSF guys start a cloud service called AfferoCloud, where they put up a AGPL3 licensed service? That would also be a way for them to raise money for their projects - for those interested. Then everybody who's sweating over 'free' and 'open' can flock there, and not bother about any of the other cloud services.

  • "In a landscape with dueling open clouds, which is the most open?"

    Extending an already stupid metaphor by mixing it with another stupid metaphor does not create a super-powered metaphor. It creates nonsense.

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