Hosting company RackSpace is open sourcing the software behind its cloud storage and computing platforms on Monday, the company is saying. The company is also preparing to launch OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, and will donate the open source code to that project.
NASA is also incorporating technology from the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform into the OpenStack project, says RackSpace.
RackSpace says they want to drive interoperability in cloud services to avoid vendor lock-in, and help create industry standards. More than 25 companies have shown interest in the project, says RackSpace, or are actively working on the code. They include AMD, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, Peer 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, Sonian, Spiceworks and Zuora.
The code is being released under the extremely flexible Apache 2 license, meaning third parties can redistribute the code, build proprietary software around the code, and distribute it with few restrictions.