Yesterday marked a huge day of history in the world of cloud computing. The Open Cloud Manifesto was finally released to the public. You might ask, “What the heck is an open cloud manifesto”. I’m glad you asked. Basically what happened is someone to 6 pages to basically write that cloud interoperability should be based on open standards. Wow! Shocking, isn’t it? Stop the presses!!! Someone in the computer world wants open standards around something.
There’s a lot I have to laugh at when looking at this whole manifesto. First there’s the name. Manifesto is usually used in the political arena to talk about your stance on a certain topic. OK. That’s certainly the point here. However isn’t this a little bit of a majestic or more to the point strong name for simply saying you want some standards in an emerging IT field? I mean it’s pretty much given these days that if there’s something interesting happening in IT then someone is going to declare that it should be open and free for the masses. The whole problem I have with that is a guy’s gotta eat. Not everything in the world can be free. At some point companies have to make money to pay the employees so they can eat and be well nourished so they can complain that things aren’t free. As Dane Cook would say, “It’s a vicious circle”. This is probably why people like Microsoft and Google and Amazon didn’t sign the document.
I also find it interesting that a manifesto about openness was done in a closed environment. This is the reason the CCIF pulled out even though they helped author the document in the first place. There’s some poetic justice there somewhere.
So here we are probably 500 blogs, a few dozen news articles, and countless thought cycles later with the “major” news that we need some open standards in cloud interoperability. I really question why we needed a document like this anyways. The IT industry and standards bodies were already working on this problem in an open way. You already had CCIF, OCCI at the OGF, SNIA, and probably DMTF before too long. How many different open standards can you really have going on at the same time anyways? So great, Manifesto crowd, now we’re going to have open standards just like you wanted – 20 of them. Well, there’s always tomorrow when I’ve heard the Proprietary Capitalism Manifesto will be released with Microsoft, Citrix, Amazon, and Google as the original signers. Can’t wait to read that one!
