OStatic

It turns out that there may be a happy (from the open point of view) ending to Dell's attempt to trademark cloud computing, which we covered two weeks ago. Whether it was all the publicity that the Patent & Trademark Office's original decision got, or whether someone there simply took a second look at things and understood the issues, it appears that they're on the way to denying the application after all.

There's been a lot of talk about cloud computing lately, including some excellent crystal-ball reading from our parent blog GigaOM. But it's an essay from the ever-interesting Tim O'Reilly that brings together the cloud and the future of open source - and some of his conclusions may distress those who are firmly convinced that open source licenses are the only way forward.

This morning we got the news of the official launch of the CherryPal computer: a tiny little box consuming only 2 watts of power, booting in 20 seconds, and yet offering the oomph of a desktop computer (albeit an older desktop computer, as it requires a VGA monitor). This is achieved, apparently, by offloading most of the work to the cloud using Amazon's servers. While the prospect of a truly green computer is intruiging, from the open source point of view this effort does not seem to be fully-baked yet.

This is the first of our weekly Cloudy Saturday columns that will delve into using cloud computing techniques to manage your own server farms, both large and small. This week we'll talk about the Puppet automation system from Reductive Labs. Puppet is built upon the legacy of the venerable Cfengine system, but takes things to a whole new level.