Shuttleworth Tosses $1M Behind Open-Source Project

Mark Shuttleworth is investing one million dollars into an open-source project to support its rapid growth and community.

This morning it's being announced that Mark Shuttleworth will be investing $1MM USD through a convertible note into Inktank, the company backing the Ceph Distributed Storage System. Ceph is the distributed file-system that's POSIX-compatible, fault-tolerant, doesn't possess a single point of failure, and has been in the mainline kernel since Linux 2.6.34.

While Ceph has been in development for years, Inktank was only founded this year to provide professional services and support around this open-source distributed file-system. On the positive end, Inktank has allowed for Ceph's development team to expand.

Aside from Mark tossing some money behind Inktank as an investor, Ubuntu 12.10 is also supporting Ceph as a storage option for OpenStack. It's not a big surprise that Mark's the investor. Last week it seemed pretty clear based upon the description of the imminent announcement.

As of this morning the Inktank press release has yet to hit the wire, but it should be up soon.