Is open source just the first round in a bigger battle? One of the major themes at OSBC this year was the emergence of cloud computing as a deployment platform. Cloud computing has been around for quite a long time, and while I wouldn’t call it mainstream, there is definitely an interesting correlation with open source. If you’re trying to build a cost-effective cloud platform, right now open source is the way to go. Most Amazon EC2 users are running a LAMP stack. Cloudera, led by Mike Olson, is commercializing the open source Hadoop project. And Sun is getting into cloud computing with both public and private cloud technologies expected in the coming months.I don’t expect it will stay exclusively open source, though. Microsoft appears to have big intentions with its Azure cloud platform. Maybe open source was just the opening skirmish in a much larger battle for the cloud.And here are some photos from around OSBC. Open SourceCloud Computing