Ubuntu's Shuttleworth urges open-source foundations to stop fighting each other and focus

'Nobody asked for duelling vendors to be replaced by duelling foundations'

At the newly branded Open Infrastructure Summit (formerly the OpenStack Summit) in Denver, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth opened his keynote with a pointed joke about the difficulty in deciding which newly graduated project's branded freebie socks to wear, making an appeal for the OpenStack Foundation to retain its focus on OpenStack.

Rather than empire building, trying to draw as many projects and sponsors as possible under their umbrellas, open source foundations should concentrate on what makes them different from the proprietary walled gardens of traditional enterprise vendors, he said.

"We are no longer the rebel outsiders. We are in a sense becoming the empire. It's really important for us to think about how we want to lead. If we want to be different to the previous empire we have to choose every day to be different," Shuttleworth said, alluding to recent spats between OpenStack and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) over the telecoms market.

"Nobody asked for duelling vendors to be replaced by duelling foundations."

Hinting that some vendors use open-source foundations as a fig leaf to hide their ambitions for domination, Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu will henceforth support all forms of OpenStack with the same level of SLAs and the same price point. Likewise, it will be agnostic in its support of Kubernetes, development of which takes place under the auspices of the CNCF.

"We will support Kubernetes from Google, Amazon, Azure and VMware... because all of those deliver Kubernetes on Ubuntu."

Although Canonical is a major sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, Shuttleworth, who declared himself a big fan, remarked that OpenStack is not always the best fit and that he wanted to remain open to whatever works best rather than having that choice dictated by a membership foundation.

"If we want to help people find the right solution we have to be open to all of the possibilities, to other open-source projects and even proprietary solutions," he said.

At a media briefing, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, acknowledged that drawing a clear divide between a core project and the wider environment in a fast-evolving landscape is challenging. "The best thing about open source is that there's so much of it and the worst thing about open source is that there's so much of it," he quipped.

Bryce said the Foundation is looking to consolidate its efforts around a number of distinct areas, for example 5G.

"As we move forward, instead of considering the whole open-source landscape we'll be looking at specific use cases and exploring the relationships between individual technologies and projects within that," he said.

The Foundation will be looking to learn about the viability of these stacks from individual member organisations that have deployed them, he added.

Despite the rebadging of the summit, Bryce insisted that OpenStack remains central to the Foundation's plans.

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