At the Speed of Open Source

Angel Diaz, Vice President of Cloud Architecture and Technology at IBM, recalls the meeting in which he convinced CEO Sam Palmisano that IBM should support OpenStack. "It didn't make sense to make another open source competitor," he says. "That does no good to anybody. And Sam looked at me and said, 'That's great. Make it bigger than Linux'."

Several years later, OpenStack may have already reached Palmisano's objective. The OpenStack Foundation now includes 800 corporations and organizations and 2,000 code contributors. As Alan Clark, a director at SUSE who currently chairs the OpenStack Foundation board, points out, these numbers are comparable to those of the Linux kernel [1], prompting Clark to call OpenStack "The Linux of the Cloud."

However, the comparison goes deeper than numbers. Foundation leaders attribute OpenStack's success directly to Linux and open source software and their example. "Technological innovation, especially in the last twenty or thirty years, has been driven by the innovation of communities," says Diaz. "Linux was a great example of that." In fact, free software is viewed as so central to the continuing success of OpenStack that Diaz adds matter-of-factly, "If you're not building your cloud so that it's open by design, you're building a dead-end cloud. You cannot move at the pace that you have to in order to be in the market."

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