Pivotal opens up Cloud Foundry to open-source fights

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Pivotal spun out the Cloud Foundry Foundation last week, marking another instance where a commercial effort turns into an open source play. It’ll be interesting see how this move works, given that both OpenStack and Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS platforms are aimed at the same users. There are three hurdles for the CFF to get past:

• The PaaS market is relatively small compared to the IaaS and SaaS spaces. Having three or more open source standards may be too many for the market to support.
• IT organizations and developers are already confused about what PaaS brings to the cloud computing table. Having three open source versions won’t help clarify matters.
• Inevitably, somebody will end up on the right side of the wrong standard, adding risk for those adopting PaaS…

The extremely well-funded Cloud Foundry was already an open source PaaS, licensed under Apache 2.0. However, Pivotal will now allow a consortium of other vendors to participate in Cloud Foundry’s governance and direction. Founding members of the initiative include EMC, VMware (an EMC subsidiary), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Rackspace, and SAP. The OpenStack PaaS project, Solum, is new, so it has little traction. The expanded reach of the more established Cloud Foundry could end up deflating the value of Solum before it has a chance to become a significant player…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/pivotal-opens-cloud-foundry-open-source-fights-237468

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