My Quick Note On: Open Stack = Open Cloud
In a move to scale up innovation Rackspace has not choice but to play the open source card. They have an innovative approach to cloud but we all have seen that they are having scale challenges.
Opening up will really give rackspace a boost for the future. More importantly the public cloud player like rightscale and others need a defacto standard to compete against Amazon. With the "private cloud" pushing hard the public cloud guys need a ground breaking cohesive approach. Open Stack is about Open cloud and the ever present stack wars that we covered extensively on SiliconANGLE.
Gravity to make this happen is NASA.org - Nasa has some massive compute and software resources to add to this. The ultimate partner in a open source project. Add the commercial angle with Rackspace and RightScale and you have instant momentum.
Keys to success will be instant developer wins and signs of "real" scale. I like this deal and the key will be how they can converge all the compute, networking, and storage plumbing for app developers.
Links:
http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/07/18/openstack-game-changing-open-source-cloud-platform/
http://www.rackspace.com/information/mediacenter/announcements/openstack.php
http://nebula.nasa.gov/blog/2010/jul/nebula-technology-to-play-key-role-in-new-open-sou/