In response to the news this week that the city of Los Angeles is going Googlefied with a $7.25 million, five-year deal to adopt Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications, Novell's blog has an interesting rebuttal. Of course, the reason for the city's switch to Google's corner of the cloud is to save money that it would otherwise spend on expensive software licenses, and it will save. Still, the Novell blog post is intriguing because it's a missive from an open source-focused company criticizing the Los Angeles decision with barbs frequently aimed at open source solutions. It claims that L.A. should have opted for Novell's fee-based Groupwise solution. Huh?

Andrea DiMaio from the Gartner Blog Network asks an interesting question in a post titled "Is Cloud Computing Killing Open Source in Government?," and InfoWorld weighs in on the issue as well. One might as well not limit the question to government usage. Is cloud computing killing open source in general? DiMaio notes that government officials in London and Washington D.C. are finding that primary drivers for open source adoption--including cost savings and vendor independence--are going away, while free, cloud applications proliferate and grab headlines.

Do Google Docs and Zoho's applications spell doom for, say, the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications? I think cloud computing and open source are on a collision course to grow together, with neither killing the other.

Keir Thomas, author of Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference--a free online book--has an interesting post up called How Open Source Can Beat the Status Quo. In it, he looks at some of the current challenges to the computing status quo, and how they define opportunities for open source. I agree with some of the opportunities he points to, and there are a few more worth mentioning.