With the Anvil release in the bag, Dell announced on the community list yesterday that it has stopped active contribution on the Crowbar project.  This effectively relaunches Crowbar as a truly vendor-neutral physical infrastructure provisioning tool.

While I cannot speak for my employer, Dell, about Crowbar; I continue serve in my role as a founder of the Crowbar Project.  I agree with Eric S Raymond that founders of open source projects have a responsibility to sustain their community and ensure its longevity.

In the open DevOps bare metal provisioning market, there is nothing that matches the capabilities developed in either Crowbar v1 or OpenCrowbar.  The operations model and system focused approach is truly differentiated because no other open framework has been able to integrate networking, orchestration, discovery, provisioning and configuration management like Crowbar.

It is time for the community to take Crowbar beyond the leadership of a single hardware vendor, OS vendor, workload or CMDB tool.  OpenCrowbar offers operations freedom and flexibility to build upon an abstracted physical infrastructure (what I’ve called “ready state“).

We have the opportunity to make open operations a reality together.

As a Crowbar founder and its acting community leader, you are welcome to contact me directly or through the crowbar list about how to get engaged in the Crowbar community or help get connected to like-minded Crowbar resources.