Crosby: There isn't a home well identified yet. It's not the traditional IETF world. It's part of a conversation with other vendors. In general, going into existing organizations is great because they have frameworks, but where it belongs is an interesting conversation.
Conry Murray: In a roundtable discussion at Interop, you discussed the important role of open source innovation. But proprietary software and hardware also play a role in innovation, and I'm thinking in particular about VMware and Apple. How do you see the forces of open source and proprietary technology interacting when it comes to innovation?
Crosby:I think it's a race argument. If you are far in the lead, why would you throw it to open source? But open source is a tool to strategically advance certain sectors of the industry to maintain balance and achieve a rate of innovation.
Take cloud and IaaS. If there were 50 vendors going on about IaaS, the clutter would be so bad that the incumbent would walk away with it all. For us, the goal in terms of an effort like OpenStack is to align the industry around a vehicle to meet commercial needs but also move faster to deliver core components that people are fighting around that has no long-term commercial value.
It's like the Margherita pizza: cheese, sauce, crust. Those are the basic ingredients and you build something on top of it. Look at companies building applications and services on top of Amazon EC2 and S3. OpenStack will create more opportunity for CPU vendors, server vendors, storage vendors, and others who will build on top of it.
