The week started with the announcement that Joyent had acquired ReasonablySmart. This extends the range of Joyent's offering into the framework space and it's a very smart move. There is a real opportunity here to push for the creation of an open source standard especially since Jason Hoffman, co-founder and CTO at Joyent states "Unlike competing Platform-as-a-Service offerings, we intend to keep this new Joyent offering completely open-source". Good move.
During the week I was invited by Redmonk to the Cloud Interoperability Forum. I'll be landing in San Francisco on Monday. This event promises to be a gathering of some interesting players in the open source cloud computing space. It's one to watch.
Lastly, the week ended with Jesse Robbins' announcement of Chef, an open sourced configuration management tool.
Open source is really starting to make some progress in the cloud computing space with companies like Aptana, 10Gen and the team behind Eucalyptus. Obviously I've been concerned that the Azure framework, which is about to make its entrance this year, might create a marketplace built around a proprietary stack. If this happened it could create years of lock-in under the guise of a functioning market.
However the bold moves made by the open source community and the other actions which I know are in the pipeline give me cause for comfort. In fact, it's so positive that I'll make another prediction for this year.
This is the year of open source and when open source cloud computing becomes the rule and not the exception.
