[chrismsnz]

It was touched on in the article, but allowing the actual plumbing of a cloud to become commodity, it allows them to focus on their core business: managed hosting.

Along with other benefits such as a developer community around their infrastructure and ease of friction around moving cloud hosting providers (i.e. Vendor lock-in) makes this a clear win and an excellent move by Rackspace.

[jacquesm]

This could very well be the biggest announcement of something being open-sourced made this year. I wonder if Amazon will make a comparable countermove or if they will join. (Or ignore it altogether, unlikely).

[izak30]

They won't have to make theirs open, or join OpenStack. All they would have to do is write a set of binaries that translate commands from one to another, and translate return values. Presumably some hackers will sort this out and open source it.

[jnoller]

boto, libcloud, etc, etc mostly support talking to multiple clouds. The API is far from the hardest part of migration - it's actually pretty simple in most cases, unless that vendor picks something like SOAP.