Will OpenStack be grounded now that NASA is no longer involved with developing OpenStack? Image: scazon/Flickr

NASA is reported to be withdrawing its participation with OpenStack, which the space agency co-founded with Rackspace.

OpenStack has come into its own, IBMs Dr. Angel Luis Diaz wrote for Cloudline in April. So with Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, Yahoo, Rackspace, and Red Hat on board, the time has come to scale back involvement, NASA says.

Karen Petraska, from NASAs CIO office, said the agency is not interested in competing with commercial cloud companies, and would rather be a smart consumer of commercial cloud services, reports Web Host Industry News.

The report also said NASA would also cease its developmental involvement with cloud infrastructure solution Nebula.

Cloudline contributor Alexander Haislip writes in OpenStack Optimism Overrides Confusion:

Today, there are more questions than answers [about OpenStack], which stands to reason given OpenStacks young age and the quantity of collaborators. Yet the evidence suggests large companies are grabbing hold of OpenStacks technology and are going to ride it into the big businesses that want cloud computing.

Haislip adds:

Theres clearly value in OpenStack. Few techies want VMware or Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop a Microsoftian hegemony in the cloud where tinkering is impossible and theyre forced into a whole universe of other, unrelated or undesirable products. Few business executives want to pay for proprietary software, especially for systems at scale, if it can be at all avoided. It comes down to a question of adopting and adapting the immature OpenStack or paying through the nose for a proprietary competitor.

Weigh in: Will NASA withdrawing from the OpenStack launch pad hurt the open source cloud platform? Or is there no stopping the OpenStack rocket, as Haislip writes, simply because it is the anti-Microsoft (read: lock-in)?

Originally posted here:

OpenStack Launch Partner NASA Grounds Development