Re: Please let's not talk about "clouds"
On 04/22/2013 10:32 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 2) Facilitating people to use existing Free Software to build "Private
> Clouds" using software like CloudStack, Eucalyptus and OpenStack on
> top of Debian.
>
> Presuming these are free software
They are.
> there's no reason not to include
> them in a distro. They are useful.
We already have Eucalyptus since a very very long time, OpenStack
and XCP (Xen Cloud Platform) will be in Wheezy. All of them are indeed
free software providing IaaS.
I maintain both OpenStack and XCP packages. I had a look into
CloudStack, and I found it not fit for Debian in its current state (eg: it
didn't even build the last time I tried, unless you're running on a very
very outdated Debian). So it's a "technical no", though that may change
anytime (either by some upstream work or work from a volunteered
package maintainers).
> But if the idea is that the user
> uses his own servers, please don't use the term "cloud" to describe
> it.
I think it's fine to use the world "cloud" if we explicitly tell that it
refers
to IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) in this case.
> These two activities are entirely separate.
Though for both of them, we need a Debian Cloud Image, with
cloud-init installed and so on. This list is the perfect place to talk
about that.
> To think of them as
> related is a consequence of the incoherent concept of "the cloud".
>
> To help people think clearly, please don't describe them as "Debian
> cloud" activities. Please talk about them as two separate and
> unrelated activities.
>
> For the same reason, this mailing list shouldn't exist either.
When this list was created, I thought we would talk about Eucalyptus,
OpenStack and XCP. I was very disappointed when I could read things
about Azure and AWS, which Debian tried to "support". I was even
more disappointed to see such "official" Debian images being available
only on these private companies cloud, and seeing that they were built
using these non-free IaaS. To me, that's counter productive to what we
do in Debian. But I just let it go, thinking that after all, it is
better if we
have a better support on such platforms.
I hope to make this change though. I'm currently gathering information
on how to do it so that the resulting images may work on any platform,
including the non-free ones stated above, and that's not an easy task.
Currently, I've managed to find out that Ubuntu folks are using a highly
patched version of live-build. I hope I can get the patches and make it
land upstream, so that we can finally use it too.
Cheers,
Thomas
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