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.

France is a particularly fruitful garden for open source projects and commercial open source companies in Europe. Yet, even in this age of broadband, telepresence, and, of course, the good old jumbo jet, it seems like outposts of French OSS companies are sprouting up in Silicon Valley more and more.

In March, eXoPlatform, a Java middleware provider based in Paris, opened a San Francisco office and moved its CEO and and other top executives to the U.S. to run it. The logic is impeccable. Says Marketing Director Katie Poplin, “I'm now closer to many more Java developers, and there are simply more opportunities to meet with them, understand their day-to-day challenges, and evangelize eXo products.”

The OW2 Cloud Initiative announced in May started with a "bedrock" of integrated open source applications at the intersection of the PaaS and Iaas cloud layers. One of the questions/wishes for the initiative has been finding collaboration partners down at the IaaS and Haas levels, and up at the SaaS level.

Those wishes are rapidly being granted. In late June, Ignacio M. Llorente, co-leader of the OpenNebula project offered to help integrate his IaaS platform with the OW2 "bedrock" PaaS apps. Soon thereafter, Nicolas Barcet, the Ubuntu Product Manager at Canonical, proposed created a demo integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud IaaS offering with the OW2 PaaS bedrock applications. 

The software consortium OW2 has opened up the working group that is creating a Cloud Stack of integrated, open source cloud infrastructure to non-members.

The group launched what it calls the OW2 Open Source Cloudware Initiative in May — a plan both to define and develop a portfolio of interoperable "open cloud" software tools to help systems integrators and hosters create fully open source cloud architectures.