Red Hat Taking Gluster from Open Core to Open Source

Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) wants to return the Gluster filesystem to its open source roots. Red Hat acquired Gluster for $136 million in October 2011 and is now moving to help further accelerate its innovation.

The GlusterFS project will now have an independent GlusterFS project board that includes members from Red Hat, Facebook, Citrix and Eucalyptus. A key goal of the new board is to help open up GlusterFS to the community and to innovation.

John Mark Walker, GlusterFS Community Manager, explained during a webcast discussing the Gluster roadmap that Red Hat has increased the number of developers working on Gluster. He add that Red Hat has also accelerated the plans that Gluster had for themselves to improve the product and their community relations.

GlusterFS is an open source project, though Walker noted that as a company Gluster had over time, taken an open core model. That’s now going to change at Red Hat.

“I’m happy to say that we’re turning back the clock and making GlusterFS more like it used to be,” Walker said. “We were building our user base but the problem was we weren’t doing a good job of being collaborative and externally focused.”

Read the full story at InfoStor:
Red Hat Taking Gluster from Open Core to Open Source

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