Open Cloud Initiative

The Open Cloud Principles (OCP) draft has been updated based on feedback received. In particular, intellectual property has been split into copyrights, patents and trademarks for the sake of clarity and a number of the requirements have been demoted to recommendations. This change was made to maximise compatibility with existing standards, particularly those which may have been developed by a single company rather than an open community process (e.g. Amazon EC2 API, Google GData).

A draft of the Open Cloud Principles (OCP) has been released following a week of intensive development and public and private community consultation. The requirements are clear and concise, striking a good balance between the needs of consumers and vendors. Just as "Open Source" was intended as a more "business friendly" version of Free Software, "Open Cloud" promises to deliver the same for cloud computing.

This diagram represents the four main levels of "openness" that are relevant to cloud computing, and illustrates how "Open Cloud" finds an ideal balance between the needs of users and vendors (we are currently somewhere between the first two dots):

Sam Ruby, a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source software projects, as well as to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the feedvalidator.org web service, has reviewed the Open Cloud Principles draft.

The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) working group is scheduled to kick off this week following approval by the Open Grid Forum (OGF) steering committee last week. While completely independent of the Open Cloud Initiative, the two projects share similar goals and the API should be one of the first to be whitelisted by this project.

I write this letter in order to be 100% transparent with you about a new initiative that could prove critical to the development of computing and the Internet: the protection of the term “Open Cloud” with a certification trademark (like British Standards’ Kitemark® and the FAIRTRADE symbol) as well as its definition via an open community consensus process.

Simon Wardley is an advocate of both cloud computing and the open source community. Over many years, he has consistently promoted through conferences the idea that standards based upon open source technology are essential for the development of what we today called the cloud.

He agrees there is room for an entity that looks out for principles of an open cloud and has offered to help out, at least in the formative stages.

Bruce Perens, a computer programmer and advocate in the open source community, not only co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond, but drafted the Open Source Definition (OSD) and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source.

Joi Ito, well-known Japanese activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and CEO of Creative Commons has agreed to help the initiative "in any way that [he] can". This is a huge boost for the hours-old Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) and hopefully a sign of things to come. While claiming to be "not an expert" about the issue (nobody is, yet) he professed to be "deeply curious" about developments.