Monday marks the launch of a new program at RackSpace called OpenStack. At base, it is adopting the principles of open source as expressed in Apache 2. That means that it is “open sourcing” the code that powers its storage product (CloudFiles) and will soon make the whole shootin’ match involved in the middleware and runtime software underlying CloudServers.

In this post Scoble himself calls it “the end of lock in” for the companies and individuals that have come to depend on RackSpace to for cloud-based storage or application hosting. But implicit in the announcement is the idea that a RackSpace customer will have dozens of peers that are using the software and are willing to share refinements, improvements, executables and (basically) experience with a community of other customers. Based on Scoble’s post, the company things of this as an extension of its high-quality customer service, spiced up with the rhetroric surrounding open source’s ability to counter vendor vendor lock-in.

My own belief is that RackSpace has learned as much from watching IBM as it has from listening to the “voice of the customer.” Its management recognizes that there’s a time to declare victory and turn control of the market over to its core customers with the understanding that they will benefit from being extremely “partner friendly” during this time of architectural uncertainty. It is a brilliant, and pre-emptive move.

The old joke was that, while the publication’s slogan was “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, the print version was constrained to “All the News that Fits.” It escaped those constraints more than 20 years ago by offering renditions of its information, resources and archives through various online channels and at a broad variety of price points. Today, the nytimes.com Web site is highly dynamic. Judicious support of multiple, open API’s make it a dynamic platform for advertising, as well as user-controlled services.

Framing it as a “Google v. Apple” superpower smackdown gets part of the story right; but not the most important aspect of the new service. Like most of the offerings from Google Labs (think Buzz, Wave, Translate and the original Google Voice), it is a “beta” offering. So it is very consistent with Google’s approach to lowering barriers to participation and heightening opportunities for serendipity. The elements of the offering that are “exposed” to new users appears very modest: The introductory page and video highlights access to location information (courtesy of Android’s GPS) and Android phone functions (like text messaging). This also makes it, at base, a prototypical implementation of “Recombinant Communications” (RC), a concept we introduced here over year ago, initially as “Recombinant Telephony.”

Yet this statement says it all: ” If you know how to write web apps, you can use App Inventor to write Android apps that talk to your favorite web sites, such as Amazon and Twitter.” In other words, the service is a graphically enhanced, Web-based tool for Web application development. It brings to bear the sort of high-level, drag-and-drop development environment to which a new generation of app developers have grown accustomed.

Google is not just competing against Apple in order to stock the shelves of the Android AppStore, it is vying for more ticks and attention from a growing community of “casual programmers”. In his post, Greg Sterling calls them “do-it-yourself” programmers but, in this era of peer-to-peer communications, it is more likely that Google has built the foundation for a community of like-minded folks to share ideas, tools, resources, API’s and libraries (they call them “blocks”) of code to introduce and refine new uses for mobile devices. In that respect, they are providing a level playing field where insurgent Android developers are on equal footing with the giants of code development, software publishing and service delivery.

As the “beta” label suggests, it is still an incomplete, and largely untested product. It is incomplete because it remains quite “geeky” at its core. More importantly, there is no clear path for building a business around the apps that “App Inventor” facilitates. It is a development utility that traces its roots to “educational computing” projects at MIT. Thus it is best thought of as a training ground for application developers, growing the base of prospective publishers, perhaps, but not necessarily attracting a new set of entrepreneurs. In the ideal, people who gain experience with App Inventor today, are the raw recruits for the information services industry of tomorrow.

Admittedly, there has to be a lot going on under the hood where service providers are sorting out the pros, cons and interdependencies of OAuth (for authentication), SAML (the Security Access Mark-up Language), OpenID (authentication), XRDS, Information Cards, CardSpace and other manner of generic and branded “ID federation”. Orange has distilled the alphabet soup into a “tool” which looks a lot like a Web site or landing page. It invites people to use their “Orange France Identity” or to select another “trusted” combo to apply as they surf secure Web services.

The idea is spelled out further in this video (in French with English subtitles). It centers around a site called Quizagain.com, so I’m not sure whether Orange has the unenviable task ahead of it of recruiting participating sites into its “single-sign on” efforts. Even though it will face significant challenges growing the base of participants, it’s nice to see such a clean interface and simple approach to a known problem.

This announcement from Microsoft and Amazon.com certainly leaves a lot to the imagination, especially when thinking about Recombinant Communications (RC) tactics. In it, Microsoft reveals that Amazon.com is paying an undisclosed sum and entering an agreement by which each company provides “access to the other’s patent portfolio” which “covers a broad range of products and technology, including coverage for Amazon’s popular e-reading device, Kindle™”.

Even though Microsoft says that it has entered more than 600 deals since it started its licensing program in late 2003, this one is of great interest as both companies position themselves to offer new services in opposition to non-traditional competitors who are fellow software superpowers. Microsoft makes a point of mentioning that it has an interest in the publishing platform embedded in Amazon.com’s Kindle. That would signal a direct assault against Apple’s iTunes-based e-commerce platform, as well as some preemptive positioning versus Google’s ever-growing roster of cloud-based resources. Apropos of “the cloud”, Microsoft’s statement also makes mention of Amazon’s Linux-based technology. This really is losing one’s religion around Windows-based servers.

The fate of Windows Phone is another matter. With Microsoft showcasing a graphics-laden, Zune-like roster of applets running on a range of mobile devices, the idea of piecing together a back-end system that is “the best of…” cloud-based e-commerce resources from Amazon and Microsoft has tremendous merit. The fact that Amazon is paying Microsoft to cement the relationship without discussing which elements are of interest to the Web-based retailing giant is also ripe for speculation. At a minimum, it signals that the fast-growing (though comparatively diminutive) Amazon Web Services group will be able to make more serious inroads into enterprise IT infrastructure, especially where companies are committed to Windows-based servers.

At a minimum, Amazon.com’s EC2 (Electronic Commerce Cloud) and Microsoft’s Azure, will start looking a lot more like one another. This spells a stronger position for both in yet another large area of opportunity now dominated by Oracle and fast-growing Salesforce.com. An RC-based approach is key to understanding how these developments will play out. Open-ended, cross-licensing agreements makes it possible for either company to piece together solutions from both “open” and proprietary elements of their current technologies. RC makes it possible to re-assemble these pieces and move them forward into new products and services that directly address a customer’s (or end user’s) needs. It may be as mundane as providing a better way to re-schedule a sales call in Outlook or Microsoft CRM from a mobile phone, or it might be a full-blown effort to make Microsoft’s Azure a stronger competitor to Google Apps.

From our perspective, this is a watershed deal that reflects a major change in the competitive landscape.

[Update: Long-time Microsoft follower Mary-Jo Foley posted these comments earlier. At base, she says that Amazon is "using Linux" to pay Microsoft for unspecified patent infringements. She notes that, although this was not a joint press release, there was no corresponding notice from Amazon.

This hardly sounds like the basis of a joint development effort in cloud computing or e-publishing.]

Even though the video is 24 minutes long, it is worth viewing til the end. While it doesn’t get into the “how’s” of programming (thankfully), it does demonstrate that the Web services approach can take advantage of geopositioning for the purpose of finding “what’s nearby.” It can also “pre-fetch” data into a browser’s cache to serve up new images of suggested venues with almost no latency. There remain several advantages to having one’s app accepted by Apple’s evaluators for listing in iTunes – tight linkage to Apple’s billing system for initial purchases and follow up sales is principal among them; however, developers can make the argument that working in “open” Web standards, while publishing a public API is much more conducive to the rapid introduction of refinements and tweaks, as well as the incorporation of content from 3rd parties in the form of mashups.

The founders of NextStop are ex-Google employees, natch. Their support of Web-based solutions and HTML5 is no surprise. Nonetheless, their use case for HTML5 demonstrates why it they are farther along on the Recombinant Communications continuum than “pure” deployments on Apple’s iPhone.