13 March 2012

VMware’s walk on the wild side – Cloud Foundry and Open Source

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Dave McCrory and Patrick Chanezon, both senior staff at VMware, explain how the decision to introduce the Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) as an Open Source project has helped far more than its hurt. Dave and Patrick talk about how they had the first community bug fix pull requests within the first day of releasing Cloud Foundry to the Open Source community. After a year in the Open Source realm they feel Cloud Foundry has matured far quicker than it ever could have otherwise.
There is a certain logic here. For a technology like a PaaS aimed squarely at developers, sharing the source code and engaging the very people intended to use the service can lead to a lot of great benefits.
Still, it can be a little frightening to see the community take your life’s labours in directions you may not have intended, or dreamed, as the example Dave and Patrick site of Smalltalk support being added to Cloud Foundry illustrates, not to mention .NET support and other sundry enhancements that companies like Uhuru have added.
You can listen to the entire podcast here:

Download the sound(right click and save as link) : Download