The one most prophetic, emerging fact of life in a technological world where open source is the most prominent ethic, is that there may always be more than one open methodology contending for the same market space, at any one time. The moment enough factions come together around a single methodology, such as pooled storage or application orchestration, another group of factions come together around a viable competitor. An open source world will perpetually be a contest of ideas.

For OpenStack, which has just emerged triumphant in the battle for the open source hybrid cloud platform space, its next great contest has already begun. It needs to become capable of scaling high-availability, high-bandwidth workloads, including the network functions used by customers in the telecommunications space, with a mechanism other than the ones it has now. AT&T has surged into a leadership position very rapidly, having thrown down the gauntlet last March, pushing open source developers to help it build its next-generation data network services. It uses OpenStack now, but it can’t deploy OpenStack in any of the ways it’s been designed.