Lots has been written about open source and cloud computing recently. Dion Hincfliffe recently wrote on a Cloud Computing and open source face off. James Urquhart generally does a great job on focusing on the customer. His recently post on Three debates that will benefit cloud computing started out well, talking about smb vs enterprise and private vs. public clouds, then totally lost the customer focus on oss vs. proprietary.
Why should customers care ??
As a consumer, I have no idea what tools or fabrication process was used to build my car. The percentage of people that want that level of detail is very small. I think the same is true for cloud customers. Do they know what language the EC2 load balancers were written in, I don’t think so. Nor do they care. Different vendors will take different approaches. Like everything else, all that customers will care about is what are they getting and how much does it cost ?
Open Source is great for innovation and interoperability (de facto standards). Enterprises started adopting OSS because it was “accessable”. Much easier to get a copy of MySQL then a copy of Oracle to start a pilot. Same was true for JBoss vs. weblogic/websphere. Enterprises have successfully used open source for pricing pressure w/ existing vendors. Open Source has a GREAT future. It is mainstream, it has and always be part of our the technology fabric.
Everyone cares–for both lower cost, higher quality. It is not a “vs” but an “and” as they are not mutually exclusive. GridGain and Inventigo promote Open Cloud Computing in both senses of Open: operation and code base.