As you might know the Open Cloud Manifesto debuted on March 30st.

It outlines the pillars of Cloud Computing as well giving a brief on what the possible threats and weaknesses could challenge the early and future adopters.

The manifesto declares 4 major goals of an Open Cloud:

• Choice; to give total freedom to the cloud clients in choosing between different cloud providers with no barriers
• Flexibility; to maximize the interoperability between Clouds and organizations on different Clouds.
• Speed and Agility; to employ open interfaces to allow organizations to build solutions that easily and quickly integrate with different clouds
• Skills; to limit the spread of proprietary programming models in order to make it easier for professional to learn new technologies and for clients to find skilled professionals easier.

All sounds good, but with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google -as major players in the market- not supporting the manifesto so far, there are speculations that the dream of an Open Cloud looks a bit unreachable, at least anytime soon.

Perhaps the main threat is that if such big companies continue to develop their own proprietary clouds, without complying to the Open Cloud principals, a considerable portion of the market will be eventually lured into adopting non-open clouds. This means the come-back to Open Cloud, if necessary at some point, will be either impossible or too hard to attain.

Microsoft for example, is offering Azure with .NET interface only. This might look trivial, but it could develop to an extend that Azure clients get stuck with it for a long time with no return.

At this point I can't see a possibility of moving "easily" from a Microsoft provided cloud to a let say, Sun cloud. It takes more than just technology to solve such issues. It is all politics, marketing and PR!

Choice and Flexibility is definitely not in the sales and marketing plans of companies like Microsoft that deliberately practice monopoly.

An Open Cloud is certainly the most beautiful dream of the century, but it takes more than calling for participation. The outcome of years of battle between Open Source and proprietary software (especially on client side) could be a lesson to learn.

At the end, it won't justify not advocating Open Cloud and the manifesto. As the idea develops more and the whole Open Cloud philosophy matures we could expect encouraging outcomes in the market in the upcoming years.

It might not stop big fishes to do what they want but certainly can limit their hungry appetite.