Future of Open Source in a Cloudy World

Bret PiattRackspace Hosting

History of Open Source

GNU to Linux (1983-1992)"Bell Labs, the MIT AI Lab, UC Berkeley - these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent."1

"Linux was the first project to make a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool."1

1) Quotes from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", by Eric Raymond

GNU ProjectFounded (1983)

FSF Founded (1985)

GNU GPLIssued (1989)

"The Hurd"Released (1991)

Linux 0.12Released (1992)

The Internet Boom (1993-1999)Linux becomes #1 server OS on the Internet1

OSS built in the boom continues today:112 million websites running Apache HTTP Server2

24.23% of Internet browsing uses Firefox3

64.8M downloads of OpenOffice 3.14

1) http://leb.net/hzo/ioscount/data/r.9904.txt2) As of 2/23/2010 http://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_apache_software_foundation_announces23) http://www.browser-watch.com/2010/03/02/browser-market-share-february-2010/ 4) http://marketing.openoffice.org/marketing_bouncer.html

SourceForge.net®230,000 projects2,000,000 registered members34,000,000 unique visitors monthly

Open Source Era (1999-Present)

150 projects164 member companies1179 committers

138 projects300 members2000 committers

The "hobby" of writing softwareSourceForge and bowling leagues have the same number of members1

Over 8,000 plug-ins with nearly 80,000,000 downloads for Wordpress®

Over 4,000 add-ons created for World of Warcraft® listed on Curse.com

1) "More than 2 million compete regularly in league play certified by the USBC." http://www.bowl.com/about/index.jsp

Only two "pure OSS" companies have gone publicVA Software (now Geeknet)

Examples of major "pure OSS" acquisitionsMySQL (by Sun Microsystems) - $1BSpringSource (by VMware) - $362MSUSE (by Novell) - $210M

Early in the life of OSS as a business

Red Hat

How Cloud ComputingBenefits FromOpen Source

Cassandra (Rackspace, Digg, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook)

Hadoop (Yahoo!, Cloudera)

Xen (Citrix, Oracle, Fujitsu, Intel, HP, AMD, & more)

Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus, Canonical)

Communities form around problems

"Release Early, Release Often"1

Cloud designed RDBMS Drizzle builds constantly with Hudson

Service providers can patchsoftware -- no waiting for vendors.

Partners can do a completeintegration and understand how.

Customers can contribute bugfixes and additional features.

1) Quote from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", by Eric Raymond

Many open source applicationswork great "once running".

Cloud computing eliminates the needto be an expert to try using OSS.

Time needed to get started reduced from hours to minutes.

Cost to get started belowthe price of a Happy Meal(TM).

OSS & cloud isn't a one way street

Open Source Is Leading CloudInteroperability

Do you like to be a hostage?Don't design your system to usefeatures or technologies tied to a specific vendor unless you wanta life sentence.

Let OSS abstract the underlyingfoundation so your application

is portable across cloud providers.

LibvirtPick a hypervisor, any hypervisor

jcloudsLike Java, like many clouds?

OSS creates interoperabilityDeltacloud

Link virtualization & cloud

LibcloudWrite once, use many clouds

Rackspace Cloud APIsSpecs any provider can use

Standards organizations cement itStandards only emerge when theresult is available to everyone, de-facto proprietary is not a standard.

Standards emerge slowly over timeand should avoid trying to solve"world hunger", go domain by domain.

Service Providers need to collaboratewith the users in open discussionand debate, un-conferences area perfect venue.

http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/http://www.cloudcamp.org/http://www.opengroup.org/cloudcomputing/

Cloud NeedsMass Adoption

To Succeed

Cloud promises economies of scaleWimshurst (19th Century) Nuclear (20th Century)(AKA "Typical IT Environment") (AKA "Clouds of the Future")

VS.

Small clouds will not have the size to financially outperform providers that can operate at massive scale. They won't be

price or feature competitive in the end.

Cloud, like many otherindustries has high upfront costs in both expertise andone time development charges.

OSS amplifies this as it has higherupfront implementation costs but

no additional per unit license costsas services are scaled.

Cloud requires scale

OSS driving interoperability will speed things upFor Cloud to reach the desired scale rapidly...

"Help me Open Source Software,you're our only hope..."

Vendors with proprietary technology that believe theycan corner the market haveno incentive to interoperate.

Service Providers, customers,and enthusiasts that want anopen cloud computing worldneed to work together.

Short Attention Spans

Meet the one minute summary

As promised, all in one minuteSection 1 - The History of OSS

OSS started in the early 80s and continues to grow todayBusiness takes time to evolve, just understanding OSS now

Section 2 - How Cloud Computing Benefits from OSSOSS helps cloud through collaboration

Cloud helps OSS by making it easier to try and use

Section 3 - OSS is Leading Cloud InteroperabilityUnless you want to be a hostage watch out

OSS is creating interoperability todayStandards organizations will cement it over time

Section 4 - Cloud Needs Mass Adoption To SucceedCloud promises economies of scale like the power grid

Cloud has high one-time costsOSS driving interoperability will speed cloud adoption

Questions?

Twitter: @bpiattbret.piatt@rackspace.com

Backup

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Future of Open Source in a Cloudy WorldOpen source and cloud computing are two terms that everyone seems to be talking about. Powerhouses on their own, when paired together open source and cloud computing can create a developer’s dream scenario.

In this session, Bret Piatt, technical alliances at Rackspace Hosting will discuss the history of open source software development and the spread of open source across the internet. Cloud computing providers are now incorporating open source into their business models through open APIs and contributions to various open source projects such as Cassandra and Drizzle, and Bret will discuss these developments while taking a close look at the intersection of cloud computing and open source to cover:

How cloud computing is changing open sourceHow cloud computing can benefit from open sourceHow open source will lead the interoperability pushHow the success of cloud is tied to mass adoption that requires interoperability

History of Open Source Software (OSS)1983: GNU Project founded1985: FSF (Free Software Foundation) founded1989: First GNU GPL (General Public License) issued1991: "The Hurd" released, first OSS Unix kernel1992: Linux 0.12 released under the GPL1993: The "BSDs" arrive under the BSD license1994: Apache HTTP Server released1997: The Cathedral and the Bazaar published1998: Netscape Communicator released (Mozilla Firefox)1999: Sun releases StarOffice under LGPL (OpenOffice)1999: ASF (Apache Software Foundation) founded1999: SourceForge launches2003: Eclipse Foundation founded2007: Sun releases OpenJDK under GPLv22008: Sun releases OpenSolaris

CatB's 19 "rules" (suggestions)1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).3. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least- hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.13. "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away."14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and *never* throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!16. When your language is nowhere near Turing- complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.19: Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.