That article irks me as it makes no sense. First, there in fact is very little room for <i>commercial</i> software in the cloud: the clouds are built using either in-house developed tools, open source software, or combinations thereof.<p>Second, what people run <i>on top</i> of cloud platforms is almost always open source software: in fact, it would be hard to see open source distributed computing projects such as Hadoop and Voldemort gaining much traction <i>without</i> "the clouds".<p>Third, there's a whole business model for open source software: the software itself can be released free (as both in speech and in beer), while the customer would be charged for the <i>service</i> of running the software on vendor's premises (the vendor nets a profit, while the customer still as they don't have to build out the hardware infrastructure/perform systems administration/customize the software themselves).