I've read a bit of angst about cloud lock-in, a lot of weed pulling in the form of interoperability standards for the cloud, and a manifesto or two about 'Open Cloud'. And in between, I've seen lots of interesting new tools for cloud computing, and lots of narratives about how the tools, combined with the formalization of use cases, pave the way for open clouds.

I wrote recently about the potential of open source software as a platform for cloud computing. Since then I’ve been involved in a couple of conversations with prospective cloud users that have further highlighted the opportunity for an open source cloud.

SugarCRM is the latest open source application provider to jump into Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud. SugarCRM’s move reinforce’s Microsoft’s commitment to make Azure a widely supported cloud -- including both open and closed source application partners. Here's the scoop.

Savio Rodrigues has published a post arguing that cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure pose a threat to the monetization of open source by specialist vendors.

Steven Martin, Microsoft's senior director of developer platform management, discusses Microsoft's call for an open process to define cloud computing going forward. Essentially, Martin expressed concern about a so-called "Cloud Manifesto" and Microsoft's view that it is biased to benefit its authors.

I have always been a big fan of web (or cloud) applications, because they make it easy to switch freely between computers and between platforms. With web applications, your applications don’t tie you to any platform, leaving you free to choose whichever platform suits you best.

You've picked the perfect cloud computing platform for your needs, and you have a well-designed application to run on it. The hard part is done, right? Not so fast. You still need to consider all the things you'd typically worry about if the application was for your own servers: deployment, testing, and monitoring.

After four months of beta availability and testing, SugarCRM today officially announced the general availability of its Sugar 6 CRM customer relationship management platform. Sugar 6 includes an open source community edition as well as commercially licensed professional and enterprise editions.

What if the cloud was an environment that favors Open Source ? Read-more to know why the cloud is helping promote open source project and open source companies.