This digest covers clouds, Windows, security, and a lawsuit over lock-in.

Clouds continue to dominate my life, as they do (or will) many of yours. While major corporations try to convince us to rent space or resources on their clouds, it doesn't have to be expensive, and some services like Ubuntu One, offer some amount of free cloud storage. But public institutions can get in on the act as well, and seed their own clouds.

Red Hat's Deltacloud project is developing a open source standardised API for addressing different cloud architectures in a uniform way. Cloud service users can use the Deltacloud API to access Amazon's EC2 as well as private clouds that are based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEL-V); drivers for private VMware ESX clouds and the cloud services offered by Rackspace are to follow.

The open letter, in the form of a blog entry from Red Hat VP Mark Bohannon, contains thinly veiled criticism of Microsoft and other companies that are launching their own public clouds.

To save money, I cobbled together a computer for my mother out of cast-offs left over from my own upgrades. She doesn't need a cutting-edge computer because she's not a power user, but she does need a reliable machine to run a few basic applications and to access the Internet. I moved my mother from Windows to Ubuntu Linux, and the experience was a surprisingly smooth one.

I've read a bit of angst about cloud lock-in, a lot of weed pulling in the form of interoperability standards for the cloud, and a manifesto or two about 'Open Cloud'. And in between, I've seen lots of interesting new tools for cloud computing, and lots of narratives about how the tools, combined with the formalization of use cases, pave the way for open clouds.

All we know right now is that 2008 will be the “year of the cloud” and that right now Linux has a good chance of powering more of those clouds than anyone else.

During Red Hat Summit in Chicago, CEO Jim Whitehurst and Executive VP Paul Cormier warned attendees not to get locked into virtualization and cloud initiatives involving Microsoft Windows Azure and VMware.

A few glaring realities start to emerge as a defined, purposeful and probably a fully coordinated, unspoken agreement between the industry heavy weights. Which is obtain complete control over personal computing through the cloud, if not through the desktop OS then a push into mobile and new cloud oriented operating systems that are not compatible with their PC counterparts.