At OSCON 2010 this week Rack Space Cloud announced a new initiative to bring "open" to the cloud platform with Open Stack. Giving them out of the box credibility to them is NASA, branding the platform in their case as NEBULA Cloud Computing Platform. I think this is an excellent move. My hopes for this is that it will start to standardize the industry a bit and while it will limit consulting dollars I might make arbitraging between the different suppliers, it will also make it a lot easier to move customers from one site to another.

At OSCON 2010 this week Puppet Labs (formerly Reductive Labs) just received $5M in Series B funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, following $2M of Series A funding they received just last year from True Ventures.

If these guys sound familiar, you will remember the interview with Luke Kanies on FLOSS 93 with Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz. As is typical of the show, they got a broad spectrum from uber-technical to the non-technical.