Numb Nuts are those people whose mental faculties have somewhat been pacified by the onset of an easy culture. It would be unfair to describe them as feeble-minded as it's more about an unwillingness to think.
In the "cloud" world there are many examples of second sourcing failure through proprietary technology (e.g. Zimki, CogHead & Virtual Iron). Equally there are many Numb Nuts who still believe that proprietary is the way forward.
A femtogram of thought would show that in the service world, competition and value should be around services whilst the bits are free.
If you're building a cloud or using a cloud, ask yourself where is the open source reference implementation of this? Where are my second sourcing options?
If you don't have this, then check your face in the mirror each day and look for the tell-tale sign of "Numb Nut" appearing in bold lettering across your forehead.
As the habitual users of Virtual Iron have discovered, it'll happen soon enough.
[El Reg talking about Virtual Iron]
"anyone that built their hosting infrastructure on VI...is now totally in the shit".
[MasterMark speaking about Coghead 'going tits up']
"that left its customers essentially in the unfortunate position of being 'shit out of luck'.
P.S. Before anyone whines that Amazon EC2 is proprietary - try Eucalyptus, Globus Nimbus or any of the other open source re-implementations of the API.
P.P.S. Before anyone huffs that their proprietary system is backed by a big company, in my view "financial safety" is either open sourced or much bigger than Lehman Brothers i.e. revenues above $20 billion and a headcount higher than 28,000 - 'nuff said.
