Fr1st Ps0t

Hello, my name is David Wendt, and I am a GSoC09'er. This year I will be working on integrating Eucalyptus/EC2 into Debian.

What does that mean?! Well... I want to have Eucalyptus in Debian, I want to be able to have the Debian maintainers release AMIs which will work with a Eucalyptus or EC2 cluster, and I want to package all the other useful commandline tools such as vmbuilder. However, Debian can't package ec2-tools since it's actually illegal to use them with anything other than EC2 according to the onerously DFSG-violating license agreement. So, depending on the effort required, I might end up making replacements for the ec2-tools. (I haven't even downloaded those things, to avoid violating the license.)

Some background, for laypersons:
Amazon EC2 is a commercial on-demand computing system which uses the Xen VM to rent out computing resources. Eucalyptus is an open-source cloud/grid computing system which currently emulates the EC2 interface. Vmbuilder is an Ubuntu app package which lets people build and modify their own VM images. ec2-tools is a set of command-line tools to interface with EC2, currently under an onerous licensing restriction.

Eucalyptus is currently not in any Debian repository (unstable, testing, or stable) and the only mention of it is on the prospective packages list with a report filed half a year ago, so I suspect this might take some work to get Eucalypus fully debianized. However, I am up to the challenge.

Sincerely, David.

P.S. This is not a troll. Also Ron Paul.