Where Does Kowabunga Come From?
Everything originates as a practical solution to an engineering challenge.
Public cloud services are appealing at first. They are convenient to bootstrap an early MVP. However, as projects scale, cloud bills explode, egress fees penalize data growth, and organizations fall into severe vendor lock-in. When profitability and long-term sustainability matter, self-managing your own infrastructure on commodity hardware becomes an absolute economic imperative.
Linux, QEMU, and KVM provide the foundational building blocks, powered by libvirt. Yet managing raw virtualizers across datacenters without cohesive orchestration was painful.
Meanwhile, OpenStack proved overwhelmingly heavy, complex, and costly to operate for small and mid-sized engineering teams. We needed something lean, robust, and automated.
So we engineered Kowabunga: KVM Orchestrator With A BUNch of Goods Added.
Software as Craftsmanship & Heritage
"Great things come from passion, and I've always considered software engineering as a true form of art and creation—a discipline of craftsmanship, an intellectual way to solve problems, and a commitment to leave a lasting, open legacy for others.
In the early 2000s, I joined the Open Source community: some of the most extraordinarily talented engineers I have ever known, united by mutual respect and shared contribution. It was never about fame or venture hype, but about solving hard technical challenges for the common good.
In 2003, I co-authored GeeXboX, the first embedded Linux Media Center distribution of its kind. When standalone media players were prohibitively expensive, we brought Linux into living rooms across the globe—empowering hundreds of thousands of everyday users without requiring them to know a single shell command.
We rejected corporate buyout offers because we fundamentally believe in free software. In today's era of synthetic code and SaaS monopolies, this truth is even clearer: raw software alone has commoditized—only genuine human expertise and operational reliability hold true value.
Software is a means to an end, not an entitlement to extract permanent economic rent. Its purpose is to deliver the most elegant, robust, and respectful solution to a real-world problem. That is what Kowabunga has always been, and will forever be about.
You may contribute to it or sponsor its development, but you will never buy it. We will never sell it, and it will never be locked behind a paywall.
Having spent decades in the tech industry through startups, bubbles, and hyperscaler revolutions, everything eventually returns to first principles: you need compute, storage, and networking to power civilization. And only those who master their own infrastructure can guarantee their long-term sovereignty and profitability."