Kowabunga is Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) and always will be. We believe in vendor neutrality and that everyone should be able to run software on its own, without any technical or commercial limitations, advertsing, licensing or patent constraint. Free software is a fundamental right and Kowabunga will always be free.
Genesis
Where does Kowabunga comes from ?
Everything comes as a solution to a given problem.
Our problem was (and still is …) that Cloud services are unnecessarily expensive and often come with vendor-locking. While Cloud services are appealing at first and great to bootstrap your project to an MVP level, you’ll quickly hit profitability issues when scaling up. Provided you have the right IT and DevOps skills in-house, self-managing your own infrastructure makes sense at economical level.
Linux and QEMU/KVM comes in handy, especially when powered by libvirt but we lacked true resource orchestration to push it to next stage.
OpenStack was too big, heavy, and costly to maintain. We needed something lighter, simpler.
So we came with Kowabunga: Kvm Orchestrator With A BUNch of Goods Added.
Foreword
“Great things come from passion and I’ve always been passionate about software engineering. I’ve always considered it as a true form of art and creation, an approach to craftmanship, an intellectual way to solve problems and give birth to something bigger than yourself, that whould help out others and future generations, your legacy, something you’ll be proud of.
In early 2000s, I’ve met the Open Source community: the most skilled and talentous developers and contributors I’ve ever met, all animated by the same passion. It’s never been about fame or money, but more about recognition and contribution.
In 2003, I’ve co-authored GeeXboX: the first Linux Media Center (or HTPC) distribution of its kind. It was a different era, where hardware DVD and DivX players where overly expensive, but we brought Linux to the masses. Hundreds of thousands of non tech-savvy average-Joe users were suddenly using Linux through a remote control without even the slightest clue of what was behind. A large-scale problem surfaced and we brought a solution for, and that was all we ever cared about.
We’ve rejected several business opportunities and buyout offers because we always believed in free software. And this logic prevails even more today, in modern ages of AI-generated code and whatnot: software itself has no value anymore. Only genuine hand-made human expertise has.
Software is a mean to and end, not a baked product. Service has value: software has no more. Software’s purpose is to provide the most elegant and friendly solution to a given problem.
And that’s what Kowabunga is and will ever be about.
You may financially contribute to it through sponsorship if you’d like, but you will never buy it.
We’ll never sell it and it’s never to be bought.
I’ve been in tech-industry long enough to see various ’tech-bubbles’, startups and unicorns, but as fancy and sexy as the promises and features can be, they’ll always come down to the core of the problem: you’ll need computing, network and storage resources to bring things to life. And only those who master the whole infrastructure chain of value make profit and last.
Kowabunga is realistically not the best-written software in the world, nor the most performant, and it doesn’t come with marketing superlatives to overcome all biased information from the various Cloud hyperscalers but it’s Free & Open Source Software, made with love, by passionnate people who’s only interest is to create the best platform possible and simplify your IT day-to-day with a mastered, cost-effective and predictable way.
It is enterprise-ready and production-grade and will help you take back control of what’s rightfully yours.”
Benjamin Zores, Kowabunga original author