This week, Rackspace and NASA (a cloud computing pioneer), annouced a major contribution of source code to the open-source community, with the launch of OpenStack – a project to develop the software needed to deploy and operate a fully operational cloud computing solution.

Combining work from Rackspace, who run a large public cloud system, and NASA who were among the first to develop private cloud systems, the new OpenStack system currently consists of “OpenStack Object Store”, a cloud-scale storage solution based on Rackspace Cloud Storage, and the newly developed “OpenStack Compute”, the basis for an Amazon EC2 competitor providing computing infrastructure on demand.

So what do Rackspace get out of this? Well, if things go to plan for Rackspace, then in 5 years you’ll be running your applications on an OpenStack cloud, which Rackspace will manage either in their own data centre as part of the Rackspace public cloud or as a dedicated set of machines in a private cloud they host for you, or even as a hybrid cloud with a baseline cloud computing capacity in an enterprise’s own data centre, with extra capacity available on demand in the Rackspace cloud. Of course, you could choose to work with someone else on OpenStack, but Rackspace will be hoping you choose to stick with a company that obviously knows the code well and has been running it successfully for several years. There’s a video interview with one of the Rackspace Cloud founders on Redmonk where this subject comes up.

While these contributions from Rackspace and NASA are significant pieces of the cloud puzzle, the real work of OpenStack is still to come – they have signed up 25 partner organisations, and are now working hard on completing the development and testing of the systems, and adding functionality.

The possibilities for “OpenStart Compute” in particular are significant, with cooperation from across the industry, we could see the rapid inclusion of technologies like CloudAudit, which helps companies verify the security capabilites of a cloud computing platform, and “Open vSwitch”, a network switch that operates inside the cloud, providing the management and security capabilities of a physical network switch but without many of the limitatioons that go with physical cabling.

Assuming OpenStack develops positively, it’s likely that there will be rapid additions of new systems like an “OpenStack Message Queue”, and “OpenStack Block Storage”, though much of the development will depend on the willingness of contributors to either hand over code that is currently closed source, or to start again with a clean slate and re-develop solutions based on the lessons they’ve previously learnt.

The other possibility is that Amazon continues to take the majority share of the cloud computing market, continues to grow their economies of scale and overall cost leadership, adds functionality to match any new additions to OpenStack (currently Amazon S3 and EC2 more than match OpenStack’s capabilities), and people learn to live with the limitations of a public cloud secutiy model.

Either way, the future of computing is significantly different from the way it operates today for most organisations.