From the ‘Open Source PaaS’ files:
Ever since Red Hat first announced their OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service project, I have asked Red Hat when it would be fully open source. This morning I got an email from Red Hat telling me that the day has finally come, almost a year after OpenShift itself first debuted.
To be fair, OpenShift didn’t start out as a Red Hat effort, it was started off as a proprietary effort by a company called Makara that Red Hat acquired. Taking proprietary code and making it open source is no easy task, though it is one that Red Hat has done before with former Netscape directory technology among other efforts.
With OpenShift the open source project will be operated and known as OpenShift Origin and in a shift (pun intended) from many of Red Hat’s other open source efforts, the project will be hosted on Github.The overall goal for Red Hat is to grow an active community of contributions that go beyond Red Hat.
It’s an idea that VMware, with their Cloud Foundry effort have been pushing for a year as well. Yet as opposed to Open Shift, CloudFoundry was an open source project from day one. Yes it is a bit ironic.
In many respects Open Shift is an excellent platform already and the Origin effort could make it even better. In other respects, Red Hat is already lagging behind the large vendor ecosystem that VMware’s Cloud Foundry has built, so Origin really does have its work cut out for it. It will also be interesting to see how OpenShift Origin works and integrates with Red Hat’s OpenStack efforts and how and were they might all integrate with CloudForms (their IaaS effort).
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.