We’ve always been strong supporters of open source: we use it a lot and we’ve been contributing many things to the community as well. In particular, since early 2007 we’ve been publishing the recipes to our RightImages and we’ve also published the AWS Ruby gems that we use to interface to the various AWS services. We’ve recently taken the next step, which is to develop in public and not just periodically throw the source over the fence. As a result we now have the following public repos:

• https://github.com/rightscale/right_aws – Ruby AWS library including EC2, S3, SQS, SDB, LBS, and more
• https://github.com/rightscale/right_flexiscale – Ruby library for FlexiScale cloud API
• https://github.com/rightscale/right_gogrid – Ruby library for GoGrid cloud API
• https://github.com/rightscale/right_slicehost – Ruby library for Slicehost cloud API
• https://github.com/rightscale/right_link – New agent to support Chef
• https://github.com/rightscale/right_rackspace – Ruby library for Rackspace’s Cloud Servers cloud API (coming soon)

In addition to using the github repos directly ourselves we’re also using the issue tracking built into github for these projects to make it easy for anyone to submit feature requests, bug reports, or best: patches. Writing this, I just noticed that our Rackspace repo is not public, which it really should be since the API is public at this point, we’ll get that fixed asap.

The reason we’re open sourcing more and more of what we do is because we fundamentally believe that RightScale must be a transparent service in that our users must be able to understand what is going on with their cloud resources and must be able to control them to whatever degree they wish. In some cases this means that our platform has to provide the hooks and UI to dive down and see all the details of things, in other cases it means that the code we run or ask our users to run must be inspectable and modifyiable, and there’s no better way to do this that through open source. You can expect significantly more of our codebase to appear soon in our public repos and if there’s something you believe we should be open-sourcing, please let me know!