I’m a firm believer in the value that an open approach towards cloud computing can bring. Aside from any technical benefit (of which there are many) open appeals to my sense of community, of fairness, of democratization.
For this reason it was exciting to hear an announcement from the Linux Foundation about a new event, CloudOpen, a technical conference that aims to provide a vendor-neutral environment to talk about open source products and projects around the cloud. Held alongside LinuxCon North America in August, the event is going to cover hypervisors, deployment tools, big data offerings as well as cloud platforms and associated tools. The program committee spans the spectrum of open cloud players and includes;
- Greg DeKoenigsberg, vice president of community, Eucalyptus Systems
- Mark Hinkle, director of cloud computing community, Citrix
- Gerrit Huzienga, cloud architect, IBM
- Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services, The Linux Foundation
- Stefano Maffulli, community manager, OpenStack
- Stephen Spector, cloud evangelist, Dell
- John Mark Walker, director of communities, Red Hat
VP of Marketing at The Linux Foundation, Amanda McPherson, says that;
This conference is built on one belief: open works. We know this from experience and know that the cloud demands it in order to be successful for the long term. Because Linux, open source software and collaborative development are the foundations of the cloud, it’s important to provide a vendor-neutral forum where those who are committed to openness can advance this work and users and industry can learn about ‘open’ as it is related to the cloud.
That’s a theme we can all agree upon. There are a plethora of cloud events on the calendar – the addition of another one is normally not newsworthy. However those of us who wax poetic about open clouds will welcome this event and look forward to participating.
