“The cloud was built for running open source,” Matt Wilson once told me, “which is why open source [has] worked so well in the cloud.”
While true, there’s something more fundamental that open source offers the cloud. As one observer put it, “The whole intellectual foundation of open interfaces and combinatorial single-purpose tools is pretty well ingrained in cloud.” That approach is distinctly open source, which in turn owes much to the Unix mentality that early projects like Linux embraced.