When I added Amazon.com to our SaaS 20 Stock Index, a few readers asked me whether the online retailer is really a software as a service (SaaS) company. My answer: Absolutely. And a growing number of tech companies agree with me.

For the past few releases, Canonical has put quite a bit of energy into making Ubuntu a first-class OS for use in the cloud. Ubuntu now has cloud support for Amazon’s EC2 and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (a “private cloud” system based on Eucalyptus).

If you're into DRM-free music, you have a reason to get pretty excited today. As speculated, Amazon has launched the public beta of its new digital music portal called Amazon MP3, which will feature two million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels,

Late last week, Amazon deleted purchased copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from the ebook readers of hundreds of users. They were able to do this because of proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management. Amazon doesn't say anything about DRM on the Kindle's page, so it's up to us to write reviews to let people know about it.

You can now deploy opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM on Amazon EC2 using new Amazon Machine Images for opentaps. These images allow you to deploy an Amazon EC2 server with opentaps with demo data pre-installed on either a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. To use them, just search for “opentaps” under “Community AMIs” when launching a new Amazon EC2 instance.

Microsoft and Amazon.com have signed a wide-ranging patent cross-licensing agreement that provides each company with access to the other's patent portfolio. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it was made clear that Amazon will be paying Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money as part of the arrangement.

What was Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, thinking? Amazon just signed a patent cross-licensing deal that pays Microsoft intellectual property fees for, among other things, patents that cover Amazon's Linux-based Kindle e-reader and its Linux servers.

Are you a Linux user suffering from iTunes store envy? If so, Amazon has a deal for you.

Amazon S3 provides unlimited storage at low prices, which makes it an ideal solution for storing backups. But to make use of it, you need a piece of software that can actually interact with Amazon S3