Why the demise of proprietary software is creating a vacuum which is about to be filled... and we may not like it.

I recently attended Open Source World, concurrent with Cloud World in San Francisco and naturally, a good place to converse on and consider the intersection of open source and cloud computing and what it means for vendors, customers and the software.

With all the talk about Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing, one of the missing aspects is the hardware that enables this. Yes the hardware becomes less and less important, but you still have to have something there. Netbooks are certainly part of the hardware that will enable true cloud computing, but devices like TechCrunch's CrunchPad will most likely, in the long run, be a bigger part.

Clearly, the underlying technology of cloud computing will be based on open source software--that is, if the three cloud infrastructure hopefuls addressing a standing room-only crowd of more than 350 venture capital firms, large company CTOS and CIOs, and other cloud hopefuls--are as successful in their efforts as the show’s judges and audience anticipated.

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.

Couple of weeks back, Andrea Di Maio of Gartner wrote a blog post arguing that cloud computing is killing open source in the government.

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.

Open source is no guarantee of freedom in the world of cloud computing. The central promise of open source software has always been to release users from vendor lock-in. With open source software, users were no longer beholden to a single vendor.

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).