C12G Labs (negatively) reacts to the Rackspace OpenStack announcement – UPDATED

The OpenStack cloud computing infrastructure announced by Rackspace earlier this week certainly shacked the ecosystem, pushing a few players to answer.
VMware, for example, published a vague statement about the value of open source without really validating the OpenStack platform.

Another vendor that reacted to the announcement is C12G Labs, creator and maintainer of the OpenNebula management framework for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
While open source, OpenNebula wasn’t included in the OpenStack platform, along with Citrix XenServer or NASA Nebula.

So C12G Labs published a sort of “me too” statement where the company reminds everybody that OpenNebula has been one the first projects in cloud computing, that it uses Apache licensing, that it is open, flexible, production-ready and that the existence of a commercial Enterprise edition doesn’t imply that the free edition has less features.

While all these points may be true, it’s also true that Rackspace has been able to collect the support of an impressive number of major players since day 1.
Also, Rackspace may know a thing or two about large-scale cloud infrastructures, being the biggest IaaS cloud provider in the world after Amazon, that hopefully will flow into OpenStack. It must be seen if C12G Labs can meet this level of experience.

That said, it’s unclear why the company reacted so defensively to the Rackspace announcement. The cloud computing market is still in its infancy, and it’s huge according to every major analysis firm. And it’s not even sure if OpenStack will get some serious traction or not. 
There should be enough room for both players for a long, long time.


Update:
After the C12G Labs reaction Rick Clark, Chief Architect and Project Lead for OpenStack, published on his personal blog a formal excuse for not involving at all the OpenNebula team in the RackSpace ambitious project.

More than that Clark states that OpenNebula goes beyond the (current) goals of OpenStack:

…When we were looking for other projects we considered OpenNebula.  In the end we felt that it had a large scope than we wanted  (OpenNebula does quite a bit that OpenStack will never try to do).  We should have invited OpenNebula to our design summit.  There is really no excuse for not doing so…

Except that such excuse post is no more available online. For some reason Clark deleted it and now it only leaves in the Google cache.