Rackspace offered up an intriguing new open source project on July 26. While everyone else was preparing feverishly for the release of Starcraft 2, Rackspace was quietly showing off its own datacenter operating system: OpenStack. That's a term VMware came up with a few years ago, then quickly threw out with the bath water 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 their 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 they weren't making more waves here, as they've been a corporate desktop operating system management company for years, and it would seem that they've already got a handle on the whole idea of pushing disc images around to empty PCs as needed. But they are a part of the OpenStack initiative, so it would seem that they'll be lashing themselves to this new open source effort to create the datacenter operating system.

Citrix aside, this is a much needed project, and one that I'll be watching keenly over the next few years.