Noted blogger and novelist Cory Doctorow has posted a diatribe against cloud computing, in which he says "the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free." In a post called "Young man yells at cloud," ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn flatly disagrees with him, pointing out that the many headaches and screw-ups that go along with using computers are abstracted in the cloud, managed by others.

Meanwhile, The VAR Guy notes that Red Hat Executive VP Paul Cormier has warned the attendees of Red Hat Summit that Microsoft has its eyes on lock-in--not openness--with its Azure cloud platform. Is the cloud evil?

Microsoft has announced pricing for the components of its Azure cloud computing platform, as GigaOm reports, and you can watch a video about Azure here. As expected, consumption-based computing costs are slightly lower than Amazon's costs, but, as The Register reports, Amazon's Linux-based service undercuts Microsoft's Windows pricing.

Microsoft will charge $0.12 per compute hour for its Windows Azure Compute offering, while Amazon's price for a Windows-based compute hour is $0.125. However, Amazon's Linux-based offering is $0.10 per computing hour, and it also charges slightly less for storage than Microsoft. There are many analyses going on around the web about how these pricing strategies will play out over time, but I think the differences in pricing are actually very incremental, and the most interesting cloud computing players to watch are pursuing flexible open source strategies. 

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