The heady scent of Eucalyptus
I’ve long admired the folks at Eucalyptus. I remember in the early days of the Fedora Cloud SIG, the earliest people from the community who showed up to participate were Graziano Obertelli and Garrett Holmstrom. They were among the first non-Redhatters to do heavy lifting as we tried to get that SIG off the ground.
Now here we are, twenty months (-ish) later. The world moves fast, and hot new technologies race forward. Cloud is now at the epicenter of the open source world, and a lot of new entrants are moving quickly. It’s awesome that the open source model continues to crush. The old saw that “open source is for duplication and not innovation” is exposed even more clearly in the cloud world as the lie it’s always been.
One of the things I’ve learned about open source, though, is that sharing the source code isn’t nearly enough. You’ve got to be out there talking about what you do, and inviting people to join you. You’ve got to be working in the open. You’ve got to share: both the good stuff and the not-so-good stuff. You’ve got to be a little bit vulnerable. It’s not easy.
Eucalyptus has been consistently excellent at turning out great open source software for driving private clouds. They’ve been less great at doing the other open source stuff — not because they’ve been unwilling, but because they’ve been sprinting so hard, for so long, serving their customers and growing their business.
It’s a problem with which I am intimately familiar. 
There’s great things happening in Euca-land, but most Eucalyptoids are too busy building the future to talk about what they’re doing. So I’m going to help them.
It’s going to be fun to be back in the open source community again. See you on the lazyweb.
Good luck. It isn’t that Mr. Mickos doesn’t understand Open Source, he just doesn’t think you can be profitable without being Open Core.
Tom – thanks for the comment. That’s an interesting topic that I would love to hear your thoughts on.
I do think it is in the best interest of an open source community that there are good business models available for product and other vendors. Otherwise the open source product in question tends to become subservient to a big company, typically a hardware vendor.
But I am not saying that one business model is inherently better than another. At Eucalyptus we are undergoing a major change in business model that will reach our users and customers with version 3 of our platform.
Marten
Thanks for your reply. I look forward to seeing a business model that doesn’t include proprietary components.
Congratulations on the new job, Greg!
Congrats, Greg. Looking forward to continuing to work with you.
Congrats Greg! I know you’ll do well there.
Congratulations Greg, good to hear about this news.
Congratulations on the new job, Greg!
welcome and congrats Greg. there’ll be fun and exciting time to come!
– fellow eucalyptoids.
[...] working wіth Eucalyptus fοr ѕοmе time οn a consulting basis. Hе wrote аbουt іt іn early October briefly, though іt hе wasn’t уеt a full-time [...]
[...] DeKoenigsberg has actually been working with Eucalyptus for some time on a consulting basis. He wrote about it in early October briefly, though it he wasn’t yet a full-time [...]
[...] DeKoenigsberg has actually been working with Eucalyptus for some time on a consulting basis. He wrote about it in early October briefly, though it he wasn’t yet a full-time employee.DeKoenigsberg knows a bit about working [...]
[...] DeKoenigsberg has actually been working with Eucalyptus for some time on a consulting basis. He wrote about it in early October briefly, though it he wasn’t yet a full-time [...]
[...] DeKoenigsberg has actually been working with Eucalyptus for some time on a consulting basis. He wrote about it in early October briefly, though it he wasn’t yet a full-time [...]