At the kick-off of OSCON on July 19, Rackspace blew every cloud enthusiast's socks off with the announcement of the OpenStack project to create a completely open source cloud software stack in collaboration with NASA and a couple of dozen other contributors. 

The new project sounded eerily similar to the OW2 Open Source Cloudware Initiative announced in May, so it wasn't much of a surprise when OW2 and OpenStack announced they would work together today, July 22. Hurrah for the power of OSCON to bring like minds together.

Here's the text of the press release issued today:

OW2 Consortium will Support OpenStack with its Open Source Cloudware Initiative
OW2 Open Source Cloudware Initiative will collaborate with the OpenStack™ Community to provide users a fully open source cloud software stack.

Portland, Oregon, July 22, 2010 – The OW2 Consortium announces its intention to collaborate with the newly launched OpenStack™ community to create open source middleware compatible with OpenStack. The two organizations share the vision for truly open and interoperable cloud computing architecture. A broadscale community effort, the OW2 Open Source Cloudware Initiative (OSC Initiative) is developing an integrated portfolio of open source components for cloud computing. The OSC Initiative will help Cloud users to build and manage self-sizing distributed applications on elastic and virtualized execution environments.

"The open cloud middleware developed by the OSC Initiative is uniquely positioned to leverage the OpenStack project" says OW2 CEO Cedric Thomas, "OW2 welcomes the opportunity to work with the OpenStack community to jointly deliver state-of-the-art and open solutions for enterprise applications in the Cloud."

On July 19, Rackspace® Hosting announced the creation of the OpenStack™ community, an opensource cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. The primary goal of the OpenStack community is “to produce the ubiquitous Open Source cloud computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private cloud providers regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.”

“By collaborating with the OW2 OSC Initiative, OpenStack users will have access to a scalable, ondemand JavaEE autonomic server provisioning system,” Bret Piatt, Community Stacker, “Without an open design and development process, global collaboration between these two open source communities would not be possible.”