
Open but is it free?
I see that MS is said to be enthusiastic about this project and that rang alarm bells. Now it is well known that MS is deeply averse to the GPL so the question is what license has this project been released under?
The answer is Apache 2 see:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/19/nasa_rackspace_openstack/.
Now the reason NASA ditched Eucalyptus and started NOVA was because of the "open core" aspect of Eucalyptus meant that they were unable to contribute code to increase the scalability of Eucalyptus. By adopting an Apache license thay have gone to the other extreme and basically given away all their work to any proprietary shark that wants to freeload on the tax payers' dollar and take the whole shebang private. No wonder MS is keen.
Another wasted opportunity to make the project truely free and open. Bah!