TechCrunch just published a great write-up by Alex Williams on some of the press OpenStack has been getting lately, and the results are mixed.  Williams’ point rings clear: Some people love OpenStack, others despise it. And that’s why it’s great.

Rackspace began developing OpenStack several years ago and rather than clinging tenaciously to our code like Powdered Toast Man, we gave it away and let the world have at. The OpenStack Foundation was formed and while Rackspace continues to contribute huge amounts of code to the project, it is a truly open source, commmunity-driven devleopment project.  In the two years since the launch of OpenStack there’s been a flurry of media attention around whether or not it could live up to its promise of a fully-scalable and feature-rich open source cloud development platform.

The proof has arrived. As Williams writes, “I am reminded what Guy Kawasaki said about Apple. Make something that some people will love and forget about the rest.”  The cloud is for everyone, not everything – OpenStack is no different.  It’s a platform that anyone can jump into and start building clouds on.  We gave it away because we want everyone to own a piece of the open cloud revolution.  If that’s your thing, then you’re with us.  If you want a thousand pre-made, proprietary widgets to tack onto your hosting service, well, that ain’t us.  The truth is that Dell, Red Hat and so many others love OpenStack, and that will be enough to keep fuel in the tank.

OpenStack is an incredible set of projects that are changing the way the industry thinks about Cloud computing.  In many ways, it represents a kind of counter-culture to the lock-in that other hosting providers have put in the market.  A truly open community of developers may not have the tailwind to move at the pace of the big guys, but in the end their collaboration will produce results better in aggregate than the intellectual weight of the individual participant.  Matt Ridley has a … unique name for this phenomenon.

There is a cohort of developers obsessed about the prospect of open cloud development. In time, the fission and fusion of their work will only improve the OpenStack offering, further cementing its position as the open cloud alternative, and Rackspace’s position as the open cloud company.

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