The data center operating system
Rackspace has offered up an intriguing new open-source project. While everyone else was preparing feverishly for the release of StarCraft II, Rackspace was quietly showing off its own data center operating system.
That’s a term VMware came up with a few years ago, then quickly threw out with the bathwater of Diane Greene. It’s an increasingly interesting term, however, and Eucalyptus has been after this sort of end game for a while now.
With Rackspace offering up its cloud infrastructure tools as an open-source project, we’ve finally got the third leg of this triumvirate for potential players: VMware’s vCloud, Rackspace’s OpenStack, and Eucalyptus’ implementations of Amazon’s various APIs.
Where is Citrix in all of this? It’s odd that it wasn’t making more waves here, as it’s been a corporate desktop operating system management company for years, and it would seem that it’s already got a handle on the whole idea of pushing disc images around to empty PCs as needed. But it is a part of the OpenStack initiative, so it would seem that it’ll be lashing itself to this new open-source effort to create the data center operating system. — Alex Handy
Tonight, there’s gonna be an iBreak
Owners of an iPhone can now legally unlock their devices to run software that hasn’t been previously approved by Apple, according to new government exemptions announced in July. The Library of Congress, which oversees the Copyright Office, authorized the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” after a 1998 federal law prohibiting people from bypassing technical measures put in place by companies to protect their products from unauthorized use of copyright-protected material.
Despite the new exemption, according to Apple, jailbreaking is in fact unauthorized use of its software and may void warranties and jeopardize the end-user experience. But for developers of apps that go unapproved by Apple, this should be pretty good news. — Katie Serignese
