Marten Mickos says the cloud won’t kill open source

“‘Cloud computing is the biggest shift in IT that we will ever
see. It will permeate everything,’ he says. ‘We see it already
fueling the mobile Internet. It affects how hardware is designed
and it is disrupting some old players. I wanted to join it –I like
to be involved in a big shift.’ Mickos (pictured right) says he
approached Eucalyptus and asked to be a part of the company. He
didn’t want to move into cloud computing while abandoning his open
source roots.

“Eucalyptus is among the most mature vendors to straddle between
the open source and cloud worlds. Eucalyptus was originally
developed as an open source project as part of an NSF-funded
academic research project at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. It is built on Linux. The company is known for its
partnership with Canonical and inclusion in Ubuntu’s server
edition. (Aside: Ubuntu also supports KVM and libvirt for
virtualization.)

“But let me backtrack. After all the progress that open source
has made to win the minds of business users, cloud services can
wipe that right out. The cloud delivers software as a service,
making the source code irrelevant for the end user and, maybe, for
the IT professional, too.”

Complete
Story