Slashdot, which started out as a technology-focused content aggregation online site many years ago, has seen its share of competition among news aggregation sites but remains a popular place to read up on what's billed as "news for nerds." Many open source community members are also familiar with the fact that Slashdot and SourceForge have the same corporate parent. In late March, we noted that Slashdot was expanding out to specialized channels, beginning with Slashdot TV, a video hub that aggregates videos from SourceForge, ThinkGeek and many other sites. Now, Slashdot has announced its latest specialized site: SlashBI, which focuses on the rapidly growing Business Intelligence software category.

Earlier this week, we covered a post from VMware that seemed to brush off all three of the emerging open source cloud computing platforms that are gaining such strong momentum, namely OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus. The post, on VMware's VCloud Blog, characterized the open source cloud computing platforms as "the ugly sisters," and noted that "there are now more than 100 verified VMware vCloud public clouds."  This week, as VMware posted strong financial results, CEO Paul Maritz was asked about OpenStack in particular, which he seems to feel lacks maturity.  

Last year, Citrix Systems announced that it had completed the acquisition of Cloud.com. Cloud.com had many notable customers who favored its cloud stack infrastructure, including GoDaddy and Zynga. That acquisition has helped fuel Citrix's recent big move forward with CloudStack, its contribution of the Cloudstack platform as open source to Apache, and its choice to abandon the open source OpenStack cloud platform. Meanwhile, OpenStack and Eucalyptus are making clear that there are multiple viable open source cloud computing platforms available.

That last fact must not be lost on VMware, which has to be sensing that open source cloud computing platforms--which come complete with free virtualization tools--have the potential to eat its lunch. A new blog post seems to confirm that.