Subscribe

EMC adopts open source strategy

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Las Vegas, 07 May 2015

EMC hopes to leverage off the open source community and expand the reach of ViPR, its software-defined storage offering, by releasing the source code to GitHub in June.

This announcement was made at EMC World 2015 this week in Las Vegas, and is the first time the company has put one of its commercial products into the open source community.

Project CoprHD (copperhead) source code will share the same core features and functionality as ViPR, although the commercial version will still be available for purchase with value-added features such as service and support.

CJ Desai, president of EMC's emerging technologies division, says ViPR Controller was the perfect candidate for open source contribution. "As fully transparent software focusing on storage automation, both the software and its users will benefit from community contributions.

"This is step one; there will be more open source software releases."

Jeremy Burton, EMC president of products and marketing, says it was a fundamental mindset change for the company to move to open source. "Developers are not our usual customers; we thought if they were going to steal software, we want them to steal ours.

"This is the beginning of an open source strategy for third platform applications."

EMC Information Infrastructure CEO David Goulden explained open source and free are two different things. "The open source software can be used in the test development environment, when developers want to see if it will be fit for a project, but it needs to be licensed if it is deployed."

The Project CoprHD software will work with other hardware and software products from the company's competitors and will be licensed under Mozilla Public Licence 2.0.

(Lauren Kate Rawlins is in Las Vegas courtesy of EMC.)

Share