Today, just after the release of OpenNebula 5.12 “Firework” RC, we are announcing a series of changes to the way that we serve our enterprise customers.

Since we founded OpenNebula—more than 10 years ago—the open source philosophy has always been core to the way we understand our contribution to cloud computing innovation. OpenNebula has always been fully open source code released under Apache License 2.0 without any restrictions on its use, distribution or monetization. Thanks to this openness, our software is being used in thousands of cloud deployments and is part of multiple commercial cloud products. Moreover, many of our innovative features have inspired other Cloud Management Platforms to continue improving within a context of healthy competition. There is no better way to create software than in collaboration with organizations that use it in real environments facing complex challenges, and this leads to more useful, robust and secure software.

In addition to this commitment to the open source world, we have to better serve the needs of our customers, which are the organizations and corporate users funding the development of OpenNebula. Enterprises demand a more stable version, and a streamlined way to deploy and upgrade OpenNebula. The new Enterprise Edition of OpenNebula is designed precisely to fulfill those needs. This edition brings a more tested, hardened, and production-ready version of OpenNebula that incorporates additional bug fixes developed by OpenNebula Systems and software patches with minor enhancements, along with a series of enterprise tools to simplify upgrades and the maintenance of OpenNebula clouds in production environments.

Access to the Enterprise Edition is only one of the many benefits of the OpenNebula Subscription. Corporate users with an active OpenNebula Subscription will also gain access to expert SLA-based support, exclusive Knowledge Base contents, and Professional Services provided by our OpenNebula Systems engineers. And this is only the beginning! We are working on new tools to dramatically simplify the installation, upgrade and maintenance of your elastic enterprise cloud. We are also announcing a new pricing model, based on individual managed hosts, which will allow small businesses to have easier access to these benefits.

Needless to say, we are not leaving the Community Edition of OpenNebula behind. This edition will continue to be a full-featured version of OpenNebula. Community users won’t notice any difference apart from the upgrade support, as migration packages will no longer be shipped with the community packages. However, migration packages will be available for users with non-commercial deployments or significant contributions to the OpenNebula Community. So for most of our community users there will be no real impact, given that the changes to the use and distribution license of the migrators won’t apply to them.

Unfortunately, once an open source project gains interest, it is too easy for some large vendors and corporations who have not contributed to the development of the software to capture all of the value but give nothing back to the community. We think that it is only fair for the community that those companies using OpenNebula in production for commercial gain, or taking OpenNebula and selling it as a rebranded service, contribute back to the future of our project through an OpenNebula Subscription or as active members of the community. We have an entry-level “Basic” OpenNebula Subscription, providing access to our Enterprise Edition, which should also satisfy the needs of businesses and organizations that operate development and non-critical deployments.

We are big believers in open source. We have invested most of our time and resources over the last 10 years to create the best open source Cloud Management Platform for the enterprise world. However, the original concept of open source has to be adapted to the current circumstances because it is profoundly unfair for the community when large corporations adopt a successful open source project without contributing to make the project sustainable in the long term. Thanks to your contributions we will further drive innovation and value for the community!

On behalf of the OpenNebula Team,

Ignacio M. Llorente
Executive Director

PS: We have created new FAQ section to help you through any initial doubts that you may have.