Eucalyptus: running a private cloud on Ubuntu

I agree with your first point: The article goes from saying "The Eucalyptus project is important because it 'frees' cloud computing", then talks about RightScale without mentioning it's putting your free cloud in the hands of a proprietary 3rd party website.

On the other hand, I disagree about your second point. This is Open Source. Anyone is free to support it (or not) as they choose, pay money (or not) as they choose, subscribe to services (or not) as they choose. Using (or supporting) Ubuntu does not require paying anybody money. Arguments that you're "squeezing out" Open Source authors by not paying them are just silly.

If you really felt that way, you should take it the next step: I'll bet 90% of Canonical support is really just supporting Apache/Linux/PHP/MySQL/GNU/Other stuff they didn't write. Therefore, you should be outraged that Canonical is "squeezing out" these projects by not paying them a fair share of the revenue. Next, you should complain about all the freeloaders^H^H^H (I mean users) who use Ubuntu but don't subscribe to Canonical support. What if they ask their teenage neighbor for support instead? Is that as immoral as going to the bathroom during ads on TV?

Alternately, do you think RightScale should pay CentOS? Why not MySQL too? Apache? Where do you draw the line?

Switching topics:

The article states "RightScale first focused on CentOS, but switched to Ubuntu as its primary supported distribution because of Canonical's cloud plans" but I can't find that documented anywhere. As far as I can tell, they are just adding a 2nd OS, not refocusing.

Disclaimer: I use RightScale.