As reported by Barb Darrow, “By some counts, Red Hat contributed the most code to the current Havana release of OpenStack and according to attendees of the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong last fall, Red Hat signage and presence dominated the floor.”  Indeed, there’s concern that Red Hat will replicate its success in enterprise Linux in the OpenStack arena.  Thus, they will control OpenStack by default.

Once owned by Rackspace, the dynamic of an open standard is that, whoever contributes the most code, and the most customers, really truly owns and controls the standard.  That seems to be the case with Red Hat.

OpenStack has not set the world on fire, but it has been going through a nice evolution over the last several years.  The value that OpenStack brings is the value of leveraging an open standard to build a basic IaaS for both public and private clouds.

However, if control is placed in the hands of a select few, or, perhaps a select one, the value of it being a true open standard quickly goes away.  That could be the case in this situation, if things evolve along current trends.  Fortunately, they rarely do.