“There Would Be No Cloud Without Open Source” -Simon Crosby

I first became aware of cloud security issues listening to Simon Crosby, fresh off of taking in millions and millions of Citrix dollars when they bought XenSource, speak with my friend Chris Hoff at several conferences, podcasts and blog posts. In many ways Crosby and Hoff brought cloud security and even cloud computing itself to the forefront in many peoples minds.

So it was great to catch up with Simon this week and hear some of his views on the cloud, virtualization, security and open source. You can listen to my conversation with Crosby below. But let me give you some highlights:

"There would be no cloud, without open source" - Crosby says that we would not have a cloud with open source. Before there was an OpenStack or anything cloud platforms were built and continue to be built on open source foundations like Xen. In fact of all the cloud platforms today, the only one without an open source foundation is Microsoft's Azure and even there they are making it easy to incorporate open source software like Hadoop...