High stakes for open source in the commercial cloud

Cloud computing has been described by some of the more radical thinkers as a profound challenge to the heart of software freedom. There’s some justification to this accusation.

First, you need more than your software’s source code to take your cloud activity into your own hands. Although open source gives you the freedom to use, study, modify, and distribute the software, it doesn’t necessarily allow the use of the place it runs or the APIs needed to access that place. As such, considering your software-freedom-derived business flexibility in the area of cloud computing is more complex than for in-house desktop or server solutions.

The opportunity for lock-in with cloud solutions is huge, and the usual suspects have tried to exploit it. As you might expect, there’s heavy competition, with every big-brand vendor inventing a clever and unique spin to lure you to its cloud offering. But the behavior of most of them may surprise you. All the most interesting competitive plays are actually open source. That may sound odd if you think open source is a matter of mass philanthropy, but as Simon Wardley pointed out in Forbes recently, altruism is at best a secondary motivation for the open source cloud computing activity that’s evolving.

Open source games

The cloud computing project landscape is rapidly changing, and there’s not a hobbyist in sight. Just this week, we’ve seen OpenStack form a commercially backed foundation, with player after player folding their hands, joining the project, and putting up big bucks for influential positions in its leadership. Under these circumstances, it will be hard for a private contributor to hold sway with OpenStack.

Meanwhile Eucalyptus, the startup whose handling of the governance of the eponymous open source project triggered the creation of OpenStack, has partnered with Amazon.com as a preferred open source supplier of its proprietary-but-published APIs. In a third strand, Citrix Systems has chosen to continue its CloudStack project at Apache, harnessing the competitive merits of that dogmatically open community as a way to fast-track competition with OpenStack and Amazon/Eucalyptus.

None of this open source frenzy is motivated by a desire to see humanity bettered. Each team is playing a high-stakes, high-return commercial game. If you decide to back any of them, you could find yourself on the losing team, with your applications tied to an API that’s no longer supported. To counter that outcome, some industry voices are calling for standardization around Amazon’s EC2/S3 APIs, already widely adopted because of the first-to-market ubiquity of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Indeed, both OpenStack and CloudStack support them.

All the same, the corporate sponsors of these projects will feel uneasy despite their license-guaranteed freedoms. That unease will likely persist until at least the conclusion of the Google-Oracle lawsuit. As I explained last week, that case may open a hornets’ nest of uncertainty around the copyrightability of APIs. If Oracle wins, Amazon could be given a new set of potential rights to tax everyone using the APIs the company publishes — and no suppliers want to stake their future on them until there’s more legal certainty.

The Deltacloud alternative

Another open source project, also hosted at the Apache Software Foundation, might offer an alternative to this corporate-political conflict. As I discovered recently on Floss Weekly, DeltaCloud offers a single, generalized cloud API for your applications to use. Additionally, it provides a thin layer of adapters that map its lone API to a wide range of cloud services, both proprietary and open source. With this abstraction approach, your applications are simply an open source adapter away from continuity, regardless of who wins in the cloud computing API struggle.

Of course, even this approach has been subject to market pressures. Apache Deltacloud was originally created by Red Hat Software, which donated it to Apache. But other vendors worried that Red Hat might gain competitive advantage from the project, even at Apache, and refused to standardize around the Deltacloud APIs.

Instead, using the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) as a home, these competitors created a different proposed standard for abstracting cloud APIs. Naturally, Deltacloud is implementing these CIMI APIs as an alternative access layer for the same adapters, but it’s disappointing to see this distrust in Apache. (If you want specific names, the companies that lacked faith in Apache as a neutral venue are listed in DMTF’s press release.)

What can we learn from all this? First, cloud computing is still in its infancy as a utility, at the same stage the electricity industry was when it was killing elephants for competitive spectacle. Second, the Google-Oracle case has implications far beyond Android that should concern us all.

Finally, and most usefully, we can see that open source is not a different world deserving of a bias for or against open source projects. It’s just the venue for innovation in the age of the meshed society, where we can expect to find writ large all the bad and the good behaviors we already understand.

This article, “High stakes for open source in the commercial cloud,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.