Hey Jesse, I've been thinking about the various companies whose business practices and attitudes towards developers I agree with and would like to help grow. Rackspace was one of the few (fewer than 10 for sure) companies that I could come up with.
Could you comment on a high level what your experience has been so far, and what the attitude of developers, management, and culture there is like?
This is a tough one, but I'll give it a stab. On a high level, Rackspace from the top brass, to individual engineers and developers really do believe in promoting and pushing Open Source, Open Standards and Open Design.
This is why so much has been materially invested in OpenStack (http://www.openstack.org/) which powers our Cloud offerings, why we have http://github.com/rackspace, http://rackerlabs.github.com and are internally looking at more and more projects to contribute back to the developer community. This is also why more and more projects lead by Rackspace are really being designed in the open and incubated in the OpenStack project (Marconi, for example: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Marconi, Heat and others).
I've been continually impressed that everyone is behind the idea of truly giving back, getting involved in and supporting open source and the community. Rackspace is a company that already supports its local community (http://www.rackspacefoundation.com/), gives employees time off for community service, etc.
From a strategic standpoint, this is why Fanatical Support for Developers is such a crucial piece to this. We want Rackspace's Open Cloud to be a fantastic experience for developers internally, and externally. We want all want to make Rackspace services the ones that every developer wants to use, and make Rackspace’s Open
Source projects the best of breed solutions in their areas.
This vision; and Rackspace's values are why I joined - they may not be where they want to be today, and this vision takes time to achieve, but everyone is actively invested in it.
Sorry to hijack this thread, but your comment is very interesting.
I've been using an open source project from Rackspace (python-cloudfiles) for a couple of years now and suddenly the repository has disappeared from _rackspace_ GitHub account. I found the repo on the _rackerlabs_ GitHub account with a notice:
"The python-cloudfiles bindings are no longer being maintained and their use is deprecated. They will not be available after August 1, 2013."
I'm a little bit surprised and not very happy with how this is being handled. First because the old repository is now a 404 HTTP error with no information whatsoever (in fact, the PyPi page still points to the old repo: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-cloudfiles), and second because PyPi wasn't updated (207004 downloads of the latest release). A final release would be nice, specially to inform your users that the project is unsupported and what is the alternative.
I'll migrate my stuff to python-swiftclient. I already knew Rackspace wasn't very interested in that library, so it's not a big deal for me.
Looks like an honest mistake, but I'm not sure if I can trust Rackspace's open source projects in the future.
First, although it was before my time, let me take responsibility and apologize. You're completely right - this was not clearly communicated, its confusing, it is misleading and should have been handled much differently.
I will get the needed information in place, and handle this properly. I personally apologize for the confusion.
Could you comment on a high level what your experience has been so far, and what the attitude of developers, management, and culture there is like?
Thanks!