For all the talk about cloud, it might come as a surprise to many in the industry that "cloud" is not a well-understood term. It's often perceived as "just a buzzword" or something without a lot of substance. While the term can be abused, it's actually an important concept and it's certainly not just a passing fad, writes Joe Brockmeier.

In talking to people following the Apache CloudStack graduation, and meeting with the local Linux User Group (LUG), it dawned on him that cloud still bears some explanation. Here, he takes a look at the standard definition, some types of clouds, and why it matters.

Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs, kicked off the last day of ApacheCon with a keynote on Growing Authentic Communities. Despite being early on the final day of a conference, Kanies managed to draw a respectable crowd at ApacheCon eager to hear about techniques for growing a community.

Most of the work in open source communities takes place over mailing lists, IRC, code repositories, and ticketing systems. In other words, efficient collaboration tools that let folks from all over the world work together without having to be in the same location. But face-to-face meetings are valuable too, which is why we’re putting together the CloudStack Collaboration Conference this fall.

Last week at CloudOpen we had a short panel discussion about what makes an “open cloud.” Surprisingly, some folks don’t think that having the source code to the cloud service is a requirement.