Ubuntu, OpenStack, Eucalyptus: When Open-Source Competes with Open-Source

The Ubuntu project today announced:

…that future versions of Ubuntu Cloud will use OpenStack as a foundation technology.

Eucalyptus will continue to be a available for download and will be supported …

but also:

Ubuntu will provide tools to automate the migration process to the Ubuntu Server 11.10 release when it is released in October 2011.

So Ubuntu just switch allegiance from Eucalyptus-backed Eucalyptus to Rackspace (and many others)-backed OpenStack. A “fork” in the road for sure. (although strictly speaking not in code; they never were the same.)

Eucalyptus continues to confuse me: how does this help their mindshare? Wouldn’t the most logical thing have been for them to join the OpenStack project as a premier supporter from the very beginning, and carve out a niche in a much larger ecosystem? Their business proposition somehow continues to be “we have the better open-source technology for building private clouds compared to all the other technologies” instead of “we are the right commercial backers of the private cloud you want to build and bring together all the best technologies for doing that, don’t worry about that, we do that for you.”

The cloud API wars continue …