For those who read the whole article and like me still couldn't really tell what it was, openstack.org seems to describe it as a vm provisioning and management API along with a middleware component for long term archival disk storage with replication. So for creating, starting, stopping and such of vms through a vendor independent abstraction, and something that might be a bit like s3 without a back end.<p>A bit of a stretch to call it the new linux.
What's amazing is how the article just assumes that "open source" is seen by big enterprises as a reason to trust it. 10 years ago (the year Windows XP was released), that would not have been the case.