Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the point of proprietary network services (or cloud computing, or Software as a Service, if you prefer). Not when you have Free software as an alternative (“Free,” in this case, being analogous to open source or GNU/Linux).

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.

According to reports online today, and a release, Union Square Ventures, the venture firm that funded such names as Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, is investing $1.5 million in open source cloud computing service 10gen.

Web developers may believe that, in order to use cloud computing, they must accept limitations in the way they write and build their applications. But that view is a misconception; open standards for cloud computing are already in place and are being tweaked.

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and outspoken critic of anything proprietary, recently slammend 'cloud computing'; as 'stupidity' and a 'marketing hype campaign'

"A few days ago Google announced its App Engine, which lets folks build applications that run in Google’s cloud. Amazon has for a while had a number of services to let folks run applications in Amazon’s cloud. But in both of these cases, one must use their proprietary APIs. [...] I think most would prefer not to be locked-in, that cloud providers instead sold commodity services.

Recently, OStatic covered Eucalyptus, an open source infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. We've also been covering several interesting projects focused on cloud computing.

Last week iTWire reported how HP, Intel and Yahoo! are joining forces to spearhead a global and open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing. Now IBM has thrown a few hundred million into the technology as well...

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.