Seems there’s a new kid in town. The old kid was the Open Stack for identity and social media protocols, or as I sometimes referred to, the Open Pile.

Today, Rackspace and a few other companies apparently announced a new Open Stack, which has nothing to do with the old one. Instead, it appears that the Number two player in cloud servers (#1 is Amazon, #2 is Rackspace) is getting heads-first into an API war with Amazon (and Eucalyptus) over how to interact with cloud servers.

Interesting … let’s hope this stack stays up!

Update: here’s the announcement:

Today is a big day for Rackspace® Hosting. We announced a new project that we believe will change the way the cloud is developed and it’s called OpenStack™ – an open source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. In short, we will be opening code on our cloud infrastructure for public use.

The initial components being released through this project include the code that powers our Cloud Files (available today) and Cloud Servers (expected available late 2010). This project will also incorporate technology provided by other open-source projects. We expect to be joined by leaders in the technology industry and others to drive a deployable totally open cloud solution through this project.

Why are we doing this? Historically, most cloud offerings have been built on proprietary or closed platforms that create lock-in and make migration difficult. With OpenStack, any interested party – including our peers, Solution Partners and customers – will be able to collaborate with us to author, improve and expand OpenStack technologies.

What does this mean for our customers and Solution Partners?

No fear of lock-in
Flexibility in deployment for a highly elastic commodity cloud
A bigger, more robust ecosystem for more tools, better capabilities and a stronger platform
Freedom to decide how you want your cloud
OpenStack is an innovative, open-source cloud computing solution for creating, managing and deploying scalable elastic cloud services. Through the ongoing development of this project, we will be able to drive greater industry standards and help increase the speed of cloud innovation. As the leading specialist in the hosting industry, it is simply our responsibility.

In addition, we look forward to bringing enhancements made to the OpenStack project to our own product offerings in the future.

We are excited about this new chapter in Rackspace history and even more thrilled that you are able to share it with us. If you have any questions, please contact us here.

Sincerely,

A. Lanham Napier
President & CEO

From my other blog:

NoSQL databases are a perfect disruptive technology in Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma model
…
I’m predicting that the relational database is going to die.

Read more.

Here.

I still think it is <<insert strong adjective here>> that none of the major content companies other than Google have in any way supported Google’s stand here. At the very least, they could publicly say that they admire Google’s point of view. It costs them nothing, and does have an impact as we can see from some of the rather angry official Chinese utterances on Google’s stance lately.

They thought: why not simply requiring everybody to store logs, just in case a crime happens and the authorities would have a much easier time if they could access the logs when they needed them.

The German constitutional court disagreed and requires that all such logs be deleted as soon as possible.

Link to story (in German).

A lots of techies seem underwhelmed by yesterday’s iPad announcement. But Kevin Marks has a good pro-iPad point of view. I have another one to add:

Yep, we have seen all the pieces that make up the iPad: unibody, touch screen, WiFi, 3G, flash, big button in front, dock, … So technologically, it’s indeed a “yawn”. But this ignores the market innovation that it enables, which is the opposite of a yawn.

Just two examples:

• in healthcare, I can totally imagine hospitals putting up a stand+keyboard for the iPad in every treatment room, and the doctors and nurses carrying iPads. When they enter the room, they put the iPad on the stand, initially switched off, and figure out what’s wrong with you. Then, they can immediately enter what they need to into their medical records system.
  This is the first device for which this has ever been true! It can be carried, it wirelessly connects, it has the battery life, and it is big enough you can actually see something. The iPhone was the closest before, but the iPad nails it. That’s not just a billion-dollar market for Apple, but there is a very good chance we’ll all end up healthier!
• in education, it’s the device that could make printed textbooks obsolete. At $499 plus volume discount, that might even save the school districts money! And imagine what a textbook could turn into if you carried it around like an iPad with WiFi and high-end graphics available.

It’s very impressive that Apple manages to innovate technologically and market-wise in the same company. Any other company that knows how to do that?