Derrick Harris at GigaOm has a piece up about the "IT world's love-hate relationship" with OpenStack. It seems a balanced piece overall even if a lot of "Why the hate" either boils down to pre-foundation governance issues or generalized "concerns." The cynical might be inclined to label some of this as FUD coming from those with commercial interests opposed to OpenStack. If you attended GigaOm's Structure 2012 conference, you saw some of this dynamic in play in the debate over APIs. In a nutshell, does a popular de facto API like AWS trump APIs that are actually open? Contrary to the fervent denials one hears, from where I sit, there is very much an anti-OpenStack camp.
On the "love" side described by Harris, I'd add that, in addition to the "mega-vendor" and large end-user backers, there's also huge breadth of participation; April's OpenStack Conference in San Francisco had over 1,000 people registered. It's hard to argue against the proposition that OpenStack has a lot of momentum going for it.
Leaving aside the pro/con snippets though, Harris' overall conclusion strikes me as fair. Whether or not you agree that all the knocks on OpenStack that Harris details are truly newsworthy, his overall conclusion is pretty positive.
Perhaps it’s just par for the course that any project with so much hype, representing such a lucrative opportunity, and comprised of big egos all around is going to be a hotbed of in-fighting and allegations. But if the companies involved can hold OpenStack together enough to keep everyone headed in the same direction, it’s hard to see how it won’t be a major factor in the cloud space for a long time to come.
My employer, Red Hat, is a platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation.
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