There are countless billions of dollars at stake in cloud computing, so it's not surprising that sometimes things get a little testy between cloud IT vendors.
Even still, this story about the going-ons within the OpenStack organization is harsh.
Allegations have been raised that Shanley Kane, a woman who was planning on running for the OpenStack board, was pressured to withdraw after another member sent her threatening, obscenity-laced emails, reports Brian Proffitt on ITworld.
The hubbub began when someone nominated Kane, director of product management at Basho, for election to a board seat. Shortly after, Kane started tweeting about an email message she got.
An executive at one of the big companies backing OpenStack accused her of a conflict of interest, she said.
Basho makes cloud storage tech that competes with the cloud storage standard adopted by OpenStack, known as Swift. Swift was created by Rackspace, the leader of the OpenStack project.
Whatever the technical details, things got ugly from there. Kane withdrew her nomination and people started pointing out that the group's code of conduct explicitly forbids this kind of behavior.
It reads:
Members should not attempt to manipulate election results. Open debate is welcome, but vote trading, ballot stuffing and other forms of abuse are not acceptable.
OpenStack is an organization building a cloud operating system to compete with the likes of Amazon. Nearly 4,000 people from 184 companies are involved including HP, which is building its whole public cloud on this tech.
The group was started by Rackspace and NASA based on technology built at NASA. But some time ago, Rackspace formally converted the organization into its own independent foundation, complete with an independent board.
Even so, there has been constant rumblings that within OpenStack, too few companies still have too much control. NASA withdrew from OpenStack in March.
The upshot: OpenStack leadership promises it is taking the whole thing seriously and is investigating who said what to whom.
But the tweets have been deleted and Kane's writeup of the whole incident, posted to her GitHub account, has also been removed.
You can still read Kane's account in Proffitt's article, including the F-bombs.
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