Red Hat dominates the open source cloud news this week with a string of product launch and acquisition announcements from the Red Hat Summit in Boston and the ensuing commentary from the blogosphere.  

Red Hat: Keep clouds open, like Linux
The Register

Red Hat reiterated its definition of an open source cloud and rolled out several new cloud products this week at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. The Register offers a great, if long, summary post of the week’s announcements and Red Hat’s cloud strategy.

Red Hat Shifts Into Gear With OpenShift
Information Week

Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service competes with VMWare’s Cloud Foundry, here’s a comparison of the companies’ offerings.

IBM: Open source is not winning the war in virtualization, cloud … yet
ZDNet

Open source may be driving innovation in technology, including cloud computing and big data, but it’s not dominant yet says IBM VP Robert LeBlanc in a presentation at the Red Hat Summit this week. He advocates open virtualization, which has too many variations for clients right now.

Asgard: Web-based Cloud Management and Deployment
Netflix

Netflix has open sourced its Asgard cloud management tool for Amazon Web Services.  

New Open Cloud Computing Forum on Linux.com
Linux.com

Today we launched a new discussion forum for the Linux community focused on cloud computing and open source. Join the conversation! 

Linux.com has started a new forum for community members to discuss cloud computing and the open cloud. Just like the Linux Foundation’s upcoming CloudOpen conference in August, the forum is intended to help highlight the people, projects and ideas behind the open source cloud and advance the conversation around creating open standards for cloud computing.

To kick off the conversation I’ve started a new thread on why it’s important to fight for an open cloud. The threat of vendor lock-in is a widely cited reason that received a bit of attention recently at GigaOM’s Structure conference. Several presenters ignited a debate over whether Amazon Web Services should be considered competition or the new de facto standard.

Rackspace’s Lew Moorman argued that businesses need an alternative to Amazon in order to escape the risk of lock-in. To ensure flexibility, freedom and affordability, companies need to be able to move their data around. And because Amazon runs on proprietary technology, it’s difficult to replicate their cloud services elsewhere.

Eucalyptus’s Marten Mickos in a separate Structure panel held that the Amazon API is the dominant force in the market now and smart vendors are aligning with it. Open source projects and companies can still provide flexibility even while integrating with Amazon.

Amazon certainly provides motivation for competitors but it’s not the only issue. Why build an open cloud?

Please feel free to start new forum threads based on your own interests and needs. There are plenty of technical and philosophical issues to discuss. I hope the new forum will be a resource for ideas and inspiration as well as another way to connect with other Linux professionals interested in cloud computing.

Visit www.linux.com/forums to join the conversation!