Red Hat Enters Cloud Cuckoo Land

There has been a lot of interesting blogospheric comment on Red Hat's latest move:

Cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a web-scale virtual computing environment powered by Amazon Web Services. It provides everything needed to develop and host applications: compute capacity, bandwidth, storage, and the leading open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Cloud computing changes the economics of IT by enabling you to pay only for the capacity that you actually use. Compute capacity can be scaled up or down on demand to accommodate changing workloads and business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for cloud computing makes it easy to develop, deploy, and manage your new and existing applications in a virtual computing environment.

One point, though, seems not to have been picked up. And that is that open source has unique advantages in the cloud, er, space. Since open source applications are freely available, there is no barrier to expanding your use of the cloud at no extra cost (though I do wonder how support contracts are going to work there). Moreover, anyone can provide cloud computing versions of open source apps running on GNU/Linux, including dedicated services concentrating on specific sectors - leading to a highly efficient market.

I suspect that for the mainstream proprietary apps, the only people who will be able to offer them will be their respective software houses (given the complexities of licensing on in-house servers, imagine how messy it's likely to get with virtual systems potentially varying by the hour). Not much of a market there, methinks.