Cloud computing is still considered a disruptive technology, but it is more than that. It is a business model. Many companies that have sold software in a traditional way are now attending to this revolution and wondering if that new technological and business shift is right for them? And how they are to move their application towards the cloud? We built ARTIST for the moment business leaders have the first inclination that migration of non-cloud software assets might need to happen, to provisioning software-as-a-service (SaaS) into the cloud, while also taking into account technical, business, and organizational concerns.
Open Source is a key framework to enable the prolonged development and delivery of ARTIST tools to help companies transition to modern platforms, like the cloud. We support businesses on this journey from the start, in assessment and reducing risk, to implementation and reducing cost. ARTIST tools are developed following open standards and in many cases reusing existing open source components. Therefore, all project results are delivered under an open source license, with the exception of a few consultancy tools whose source code is not provided, but which are nonetheless free to use. Links to the source code, licensing information, supporting documentation and demonstration videos are included for each entry.
The open source strategy at ARTIST is a combined approach consisting in creating our own open source community that is maintained by the ARTIST consortium as well as existing and related open source communities as third parties in the ARTIST ecosystem. The consortium consists of ten academic and industrial organizations from different European countries and is backed and partially funded by the European Commission. The objective of the ARTIST open source community is to share maintenance and development costs, pooling both innovation and effort, while obtaining revenue from industrial exploitation of services on top of the source code, following a similar approach as established open source communities such as OpenStack and Eclipse.
Several open source communities have been identified so far as potentially interested in contributing to ARTIST. They are: Eclipse (ATL, Modisco), Apache JClouds, OW2, OCEAN Open Cloud Directory, and SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) RG Cloud Working Group. Engagement of these communities is being accomplished from two perspectives:
•related and relevant ARTIST results are being contributed to these communities (if accepted) leading to the enhancement of some of their components by ARTIST or providing new components completely developed by our project
•involvement of these communities in the ARTIST ecosystem is planned by clearly explaining the benefits of joining us, simply reusing some of our results, or contributing, if they wish, to our solution and becoming an ARTIST third party
The commitment of ARTIST in fostering open source is led by:
•the positive experience in actively collaborating with other EU projects including OCEAN and PROSE to promote the adoption of an open source approach
•the value brought by the ‘network effect’ as more providers adopt Artist tools in their services increasing visibility, tool maturity and overall capabilities
•the value of crowdsourcing innovation as the components themselves are evolved and expanded in multiple contexts beyond that of the ARTIST consortium’s commercial plans
•the reuse to the maximum extent possible of existing open source components in the development of ARTIST itself
To get involved, download the open source source code which is available for modification or enhancement by anyone. Currently we have 29 tools available but there are more to come. To read more about our open source community strategy and the projects we’re involved in, visit this complete write up.