Hello everyone!

By now, all of you must be already aware of the fact—announced earlier today by our Executive Director—that starting from OpenNebula 5.12 “Firework” we’ll be releasing both a Community Edition and an Enterprise Edition. Allow me to review some of the details to give you some perspective on how these changes may impact the OpenNebula Community.

The Community Edition will be a full-featured version of OpenNebula released under Apache License 2.0. The Enterprise Edition, on the other hand, will incorporate additional bug fixes developed by OpenNebula Systems and software patches with minor enhancements, along with enterprise tools to simplify upgrades and maintenance of OpenNebula clouds in production environments.

While we make OpenNebula open source, the packages of the Enterprise Edition and the enterprise tools that it contains will not be distributed under Apache License 2.0 but rather under commercial license terms only to those corporate users with an active OpenNebula Subscription. For more details about the OpenNebula Subscription, please visit our new FAQ section.

As part of the review we’ve recently undertook of the OpenNebula Subscription—the mechanism we have for ensuring the sustainability of the project—migrator packages will only be made available for customers with an active OpenNebula Subscription and for users with non-commercial deployments or significant contributions to the OpenNebula Community.

Another change is that our GitHub repository with packaging tools has now become private—as it used to be in older versions of OpenNebula—but the source packages for publicly released versions remain available in the download repositories for easy rebuilds and customizations. Apart from that, the current process of contributing to OpenNebula via GitHub remains completely unchanged, so the new Enterprise Edition brings no disruption at all to the usual way of reporting bugs, requesting new features, contributing to the source code, or creating a new add-on.

I hope my message will help to clarify some of the changes that are taking place these days, which are ultimately intended not only to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project, but also to strengthen the OpenNebula Community and our shared objective: to build the best open source Cloud Management Platform in the known universe! 🚀 Of course, if you have any questions, or you feel that any of these changes interfere with your contributions to the OpenNebula Community, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Cheers!