Yesterday I got a new Twitter follower, OpenECP , given the open in it’s title … I had a look and I saw an Open Source Elastic Cloud Computing platform. (A virtual Machine Management platform if you don’t want to use the “Cloud” hype terminology.
The attentive reader might remember us announcing Enomaly ECP releases before..
However this was something different
Sam Johnston announces on his blog that he is pleased to announce
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Open Elastic Computing Platform (OpenECP) Version 4.0 Alpha (openecp-4.0alpha.tar.gz), provisionally tested on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (screenshots). This is an open source fork of the Enomaly ECP product following its abrupt commercialisation in November 2009, which resolves a number of serious security vulnerabilities. For more information refer to:
http://www.openecp.org/
OpenECP is a web-based management platform for Linux-based hypervisors including KVM and Xen which can be used to create “public” and “private” cloud computing environments.
He goes on to say
It will always be freely available under the Affero General Public License v3 or similar.
Sam apparently forked the platform after he noticed that Enomaly had closed the upcoming versions of their platform and didn’t look like it was planning on providing fixes for security issue he found within the platform.
Reuven Cohen stated on twitter that they made the changes in license because
“ECP 3.0 is a significantly different product than 2.0 servicing different market needs. Enabling Service providers to generate IaaS revenue.
ECP 2.0 doesn’t include the thousands of hours we’ve put into ECP 3.0, no cloning, no vlan, no metering / billing, no customer dashboard.
Re: Open Vs Proprietary, as a self funded company. Monetizing Free was very difficult. Proprietary gives us revenue to increase dev & supprt”
Fact is that @ruv and @samj aren’t really best friends there has been some more namecalling on Twitter before.
Apart from having the source code available, another important part of Open Source is community …so the question that time will answer, will OpenECP gain tracktion and community
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