Microsoft, Amazon Oppose Cloud Computing Interoperability Plan

thefickler writes "Microsoft is opposing an industry plan, the Open Cloud Manifesto, to promote cloud computing interoperability. Officially, Microsoft says the plan is unnecessarily secretive and that cloud computing is still in an early stage of development, but there are allegations that Microsoft feels threatened by the plan because it could boost Linux-based systems. The goal of the group behind the manifesto, the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF), is to minimize the barriers between different technologies used in cloud computing. And this is where the problem seems to lie, with the group stating that 'whenever possible the CCIF will emphasize the use of open, patent-free and/or vendor-neutral technical solutions.' Some speculate that Microsoft is actually worried that this will allow open source systems, such as Linux, to flourish, at the expense of Microsoft technology." Amazon is also declining to support the plan, saying, "the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them." Reader smack.addict contributes a link to an O'Reilly piece asking what openness really means for cloud computing.

Comments

Or it is a scheme to make it successfull

[coryking]

Why are so many distributions still maintaining their own compile farms? Why not just fire up a pool of servers on EC2 and use http://distcc.samba.org/ to build all the RMS/YUM's/Packages/Whatever? Why not just fire up a bunch of extra web servers in the cloud when you push out a new release of your distribution? It is probably way cheaper than getting donated hardware and hosting.

Hell if all you haters were smart, you'd be pressuring the FSF to have its own "cloud" that GPL users could tap into as a compiler/testing farm. Your open source project could just fire up a server that is running your testing image and use it to create binaries or run automated tests.