Ops is what you do after you write an application. Deploying it to one or more servers, connecting to databases, detecting, diagnosing, and fixing problems.
Flynn is a layer of software that sits between your application code and the servers it runs on to make all of that a lot easier, especially at scale.
I know what "ops" is... but they do need to work on better messaging of their product (it's hard to do). I kinda missed the point of what they are doing, how are they better than AWS OpsWorks or other PaSS.
Well, "open source Heroku" implies that they're compatible with Heroku's API. That means application release management, runtime configuration (config:set), application collaboration via "sharing"... From what I see in https://github.com/flynn/flynn/tree/master/demo, half of the API isn't there yet. We'll see how it goes over the next few months.
We certainly not cloning Heroku's API, but we have most of the things you describe and much more in our API and CLI, including release management, configuration, job control, resource provisioning, log access, docker image releases, interactive and detached one-off processes, etc.