Web hosting company Rackspace, has said that it has open sourced the specifications for its Cloud Servers and Cloud Files APIs under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license to allow developers to freely copy, implement, and modify the specifications.
The company had worked directly with developers in an open community to create the specifications and has now released them through Creative Commons.
Emil Sayegh, general manager of The Rackspace Cloud, said: “Rackspace is committed to the development of open cloud solutions and standards. We are working quickly to offer a wide range of tools to help developers work with us to create these important building blocks for the cloud industry.”
In addition, the company has also made available its Cloud Files language bindings for Java, PHP, Python, C#, and Ruby under the MIT license. The source code for these bindings is publicly available on GitHub, a public software versioning system, where external developers can contribute.
Rackspace has also produced a technical guideline for Cloud Servers language bindings. It provides guidelines for developers to build Cloud Servers bindings in a variety of languages with a consistent design. The company said that it expects to offer a reference implementation in Python soon and is aware of Ruby, Perl, Java, and Twisted Python Cloud Servers bindings that are in the process of being developed.
Sayegh added: “Rackspace is dedicated to bringing a coordinated effort to cloud development. We are working directly with our ecosystem of developers and the broader industry to share what we create with the open source community. We believe open source APIs are an enabling factor in making interoperable non-proprietary cloud solutions a reality.”
