I’d been leaning towards OpenStack for my private clouds; it’s not entirely production-ready yet, but with Dell, HP, and Rackspace behind it I had high hopes. But Citrix just fully open-sourced CloudStack. As Lydia Leong notes, this changes the calculus a bit.
She mentions HP’s cloud efforts, but I’m going to be watching Dell. I think Rob Hirschfeld’s Crowbar project is going to hit the sweet spot for people who want to deploy private clouds. They’re deeply involved in the OpenStack community; still, stability is attractive.
And while I’m reading Lydia’s blog, she’s right about the Eucalyptus/EC2 API license. You don’t see anyone claiming that Google+’s API (whenever it shows up) needs to be compatible with Facebook’s API in order to succeed.