Read it here. Last night I spoke with the remaining Aperi consortium folks – Cisco, Netapp, Emulex, CA, Novell, McData, etc. and was relieved to find that they were right on message.
The announcement today will show that Aperi is all about supporting SNIA standards – and even goes so far to as to say SNIA will be the certification ground for proving Aperi code. I still don’t understand the issue around the Eclipse licensing model, other than it does state that if you take and use, you must give back.
The bottom line on all of this hubbub is that there are still tons of vendors in this space that either make money, or hope to make money selling lower level device management as a value, instead of creating value at a higher level. It is inevitable that that is where things will go, but along the way folks want to get their fare share of the dollars involved, and hey, who can blame them? To participate in Aperi does not require you to give up code – only that if you use the open source and modify it, you make those modifications available. That seems to be where the heartburn lies.
So will Aperi sprout wings and come to the aid of the unwashed storage masses (and I use the term literally!), or will it go the way of the dodo like so many who have come before? Success can only be guaranteed by doing the things that for some reason are the hardest to do – build real code, that has real value to real IT people, and give a truckload of it away. If that happens, all the naysayers will suddenly find Aperi religion – because they either have too or they will miss the customer bus heading to the bank.
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Steve Duplessie is the author of the “Steve’s IT Rants” blog, and the founder and Sr. Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group.
