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

The first time I heard of an “unconference” I was very sceptical. No program? No speakers? What kind of conference is that?

Well, it’s the kind of conference in which you skip sitting in the audience falling asleep because the speakers drone on or the panelists are just trying to get you to buy their products. It’s the kind of conference where people speak about what you want them to speak about because you make them to! In other words, a conference that is actually worth attending in person to instead of just watching and fast-forwarding presentations on YouTube.

In a couple of weeks, what looks like the first true unconference on NoSQL and Big Data is going to take place:

I’m planning to be there. I hope to discuss with other attendees things such as:

• key-value stores, document databases, graph databases, column stores etc. are all NoSQL databases. When and why would I choose one vs. another?
• is there a future for NoSQL in the enterprise? Which vendors? What business models?
• what are the requirements for data architectures in the cloud?
• what can we do to drive business adoption of Big Data technologies?
• how does Big Data relate to user-centric data and user-centric web applications?

I’ll bring a few slides on graph databases (such as InfoGrid), too, in case anybody would like me to talk about that. Most of the time I hope to spend discussing and learning and jointly exploring, however, as it usually happens at unconferences.

It will be moderated by good friend Kaliya Hamlin, who has a knack for making unconferences work. (I know, I have gone to all 10 of her very successful Internet Identity Workshops so far.) I’m looking forward to it. She tells me that a leaders and committers of a number of successful NoSQL open-source projects are already registered, so if you ever wanted to corner them for longer than just a few minutes in Q&A, this might be your chance!

See you there!

Sounds like the Obama government is picking up the cause of what Nick and I called the Digital Deal. Amazing! This is powerful stuff, coming not from some fringe group but from the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Here are quotes from her speech today:

Franklin Roosevelt … delivered his Four Freedoms speech in 1941 …. principles adopted as a cornerstone of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

The final freedom, one that was probably inherent in what both President and Mrs. Roosevelt thought about and wrote about all those years ago, is one that flows from the four I’ve already mentioned: the freedom to connect – the idea that governments should not prevent people from connecting to the internet, to websites, or to each other. The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate.

This is exactly how I would have put it. It’s assembly, just on a different type of town square, and just as important as the other fundamental human rights.

It’s smart she puts it as “flows from” what more countries signed already than they are now comfortable with.

She continued:

The United States is committed to devoting the diplomatic, economic, and technological resources necessary to advance these freedoms…

We’re including internet freedom as a component in the first resolution we introduced after returning to the United Nations Human Rights Council…

We are providing funds to groups around the world to make sure that [new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship] get to the people who need them in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely…

Now, ultimately, this issue … [is] … about whether we live on a planet with one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors.

… Historically, asymmetrical access to information is one of the leading causes of interstate conflict. When we face serious disputes or dangerous incidents, it’s critical that people on both sides of the problem have access to the same set of facts and opinions.

For companies, this issue is about more than claiming the moral high ground. It really comes down to the trust between firms and their customers. Consumers everywhere want to have confidence that the internet companies they rely on will provide comprehensive search results and act as responsible stewards of their own personal information. Firms that earn that confidence of those countries and basically provide that kind of service will prosper in the global marketplace. I really believe that those who lose that confidence of their customers will eventually lose customers…

This is exactly how I put it over at Upon 2020 when discussing Google’s China move a few days ago. 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. 10 years in the future it will be decisive in the marketplace. These are the early rumblings. Mark my words.

And censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in America, American companies need to make a principled stand. This needs to be part of our national brand. I’m confident that consumers worldwide will reward companies that follow those principles…

We cannot stand by while people are separated from the human family by walls of censorship. And we cannot be silent about these issues simply because we cannot hear the cries.

There is of course always the issue of how sausage is made, in international politics even more so than domestically. But it’s a good start, certainly better than I would have dreamed.

P.S. Spot the worst offender in this list from her today: “Violent extremists, criminal cartels, sexual predators, and authoritarian governments…”

Or should have said “spot the similarities”?

Today, two pieces of news came in right after each other:

• The US Federal Government’s Beacon Community Program has been given $235 million of taxpayer money for “… interoperable health IT and standards-based information exchange within and among providers, hospitals, and populations” “within 15 diverse communities throughout the United States” (see announcement).
• Also, Yahoo announced that they will “deeply integrate” their properties with Facebook’s in order to “provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most” for their user base of “500 million” (see announcement). No money will change hands as far as I can tell.

Here are the questions:

• How come it needs $235 million of taxpayer money for a mere 17 communities to make some (limited) amount of progress on exchanging data, if Yahoo and Facebook can roll out these kinds of integrations for more people than there live in the US on their own dime?
• How come the $2 trillion+ healthcare industry does not do these kinds of strategic projects on their own? Nobody could reasonably argue the business case in healthcare (save percentage of the $2 trillion) is smaller than Yahoo’s and Facebook’s (a percentage of their revenue, which is in the $10 billion ballpark).

The detractors will say: these things are not comparable, and the announcements have nothing to do with each other. And go back and lobby for more government handouts right after, I presume.

Having worked both in a web 2.0 kind of information interchange environment (e.g. OpenID and friends, in recent years) and a healthcare and “deep semantics” environment (e.g. via our InfoGrid project, for a long time), I beg to differ. Most of the technical hurdles are the same, most of the organizational hurdles are, and while healthcare cares more about security, the web 2.0 world cares more about real-time data exchange, for example. On balance, a wash.

So here’s the challenge to the government that is spearheading health IT, for better or worse (and I am planning to submit this as a comment to Dr. Blumenthal’s blog as soon as I have it up here):

I assume we all agree that an environment in which leading-edge companies innovate on their own to the benefit of their customers is better than one in which the government has to spend large amounts of money to drag along kicking and screaming “participants” — as it is so common in health IT. How do we turn US healthcare IT from the latter to the former?

Or, to put it differently: what is the administration doing so the next Mark Zuckerberg starts a “Healthbook” instead of a “Facebook” and revolutionizes, with the corresponding benefits for everybody, healthcare IT instead of social networking? If the $235 million were spent on that question, now that’d be something!

The nice folks at Kuppinger & Cole, organizers of the highly successful European Identity Conference, have graciously invited me to put together the track on user-centric identity at their second conference next week.

With now hundreds of millions of OpenIDs available in the market from major providers, CardSpace shipping with all copies of Windows Vista, and the first slate of non-Windows identity selectors appearing from name-brand vendors, user-centric identity is now clearly the red-hot topic for identity and security in 2008 and 2009.

I’m even more fortunate to have a first-rate cast of speakers join me for this track:

• George Fletcher, Chief Architect at AOL, will speak about AOL’s OpenID implementation that has provided OpenID identities to all of AOL’s users since last year.
• Helmer Wieringa, Technology Officer at Reed Business (the largest division in Reed-Elsevier, a major media and conference company), will make the case why publishers such as Reed only have to gain from migrating old username/password schemes to universal usernames and no passwords.
• Kim Cameron, Chief Architect for Identity at Microsoft (responsible for Windows CardSpace), Ariel Gordon, Director of Identity Management at France Telecom / Orange (responsible for Orange’s offering of OpenIDs to all of their broadband subscribers), Dale Olds, Novell Distinguished Engineer (developing the Digital Me identity selector on Linux and the Mac through the Higgins and Bandit open-source projects), Thomas Huhn (OpenID entrepreneur in Germany) and Snorri Giorgetti (OpenID Foundation’s representative in Europe) will join George, Helmer and me on an interactive panel to discuss the business case for user-centric identity and the unfolding competitive dynamics of adopters and their competitors.

I will start the track with an introduction into the technologies, projects and business cases for user-centric identity to give attendees a solid footing in what user-centric identity is all about, who is who, and why it matters to individuals and businesses alike.

My goal with the track is not only to educate identity and security professionals on the rapidly changing identity landscape by providing a representative set of views from leaders in the movement, but also to give you the ammunition with which you can make the case in your companies that user-centricity is here to stay, and that companies that get ahead of the curve have a number of unique business opportunities in front of them.

You can find more information about the conference here: www.id-conf.com/eic2008. Hope to see you there! If it is like last year’s, it will very likely be worth your while.