I was at SXSW this week surrounded by noisy advertisements for every tech doodad or service imaginable. One of the more ostentatious displays was from the hosting company Rackspace, which had completely taken over a gastropub near the Austin Convention Center, frosting the windows with their logos and stationing hawkers on the street to beckon passersby in to learn about “the open cloud.”

A colleague of mine remarked as we walked by, “That’s a bit misleading. It’s not an ‘open cloud,’ it’s just an ‘open stack’ they are running.” Well well! Do we smell bullshit here?

My suspicion was buzzwords, the classic “glittering generalities.” Rather than accurately describing the platform they were just realizing that “open stack” would never get the traction needed to sell the service and so wanted to bump their numbers with a reference to “cloud computing.” Note the Google Trends graph below:

It turns out OpenStack is actually a specific open source software project. And the more I read from the Rackspace website, the Wikipedia article on OpenStack, coverage in InformationWeek, and elsewhere, I actually found myself pretty well convinced that “open cloud” was an appropriate descriptor of what they were trying to do: create an open source cloud computing infrastructure that was portable across different hardware and ran like a true OSS project, backed by a non-profit foundation and a diverse pool of contributors, and licensed under the Apache license.

Their constant reference to inventing OpenStack with NASA checked out too. It really was based on code from NASA’s Nebula cloud computing project plus Rackspace’s own CloudFiles code. Nebula has since spun out into its own venture-backed company to continue commercializing the service, but that didn’t raise any red flags for me.

Of course, this is all a savvy business decision on Rackspace’s part to offer an alternative to proprietary models like Amazon’s EC2 and VMware’s virtualization tools which were just getting out when they started this project. Their commitment to open source software projects may be only because it gives them a distinct brand of cloud storage with geek and OSS zealot appeal. And their pitch of course invokes fear and testimonials about how important it is to be on a platform that is flexible and non-proprietary. No one would want to screw up their web services by chaining themselves to Amazon, right?

In the end, it seems I found myself fact checking both Rackspace’s and my colleague’s claims. Perhaps I should get a comment from an Amazon representative to see what the counter-spin tells me…