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.

Rackspace officials want you to know that Rackspace is not a software company.

That the hosting company doesn't view its software as a major asset is obvious from its Web site, where the "Why Rackspace?" page cites support, uptime and expertise as the reasons to turn to its public cloud. But with the announcement this week that it plans to open-source its cloud platform, Rackspace's strategy has become more openly apparent.

Until I wrote about Open Geo a couple of weeks ago, I hadn't given computer mapping much thought.

Well, except for remembering some tech wizardry demonstration at Microsoft in Redmond, followed by a long wait at the company store because their computers had crashed.  Ironic, I thought.

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 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.

The battle-in-plain-sight over the meaning of "open" has claimed another casualty -- the Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group (OCCI-WG) at the Open Grid Forum (OGF). Things blew up on June 17, the eve of the forum's meeting in Chicago, at which the working group had hoped to showcase the cloud interface specification a team of volunteers had been working on for more than a year.  The chairs of the working group "fired" the group's secretary, Sam Johnston, after which Johnston publicly took one of the chairs -- Thijs Metsch -- to task.

The proximate cause of the dispute arose from Johnston's insistence that the specification be given a Creative Commons license rather than the "restrictive" (says Johnston) OGF license favored by everyone else  (says Andre Merzky, who came to Metsch's defense). Apparently, Johnston then threatened to revoke the copyright on his work that he had granted the group and have the work licensed on his own. (He referred to his portion of the work as "essentially all of the normative specification," and Merzky says the logs show Johnston contributed 2/3rds of the work.)