Thanks, Stefano. I hadn't run across the Software Freedom Conservancy until now. Also, thanks for pointing out that I'd missed the FSF (via Twitter).

I fully agree ... platform execution is hard, and growing/maintaining a platform is extremely hard as history demonstrates. There just aren't that many successful platform companies. From Twitter's progress so far they've shown strong growth of usage primarily driven by applications written by 3rd parties using their API; this is a hallmark of a well executed platform strategy.

Thanks, David. I think there will be a market for that, but it will take another 1-2 years to show up. There's just not a ton of demand yet. We observed at the panel session at CloudConnect where I gave my presentation that only 60% of the audience was developing on a cloud and only 5-10% were building for multiple clouds. Until there is a broader market for spot pricing and CPU-cycle price arbitrage I think that we'll need to do this by hand. If we do end up in a world where cloud compute cycles can be treated as a true commodity (think: gold, soybean futures type of commodity) then x-cloud deployment will be important enough to create a real market.

I think you understood very clearly, in fact. My perspective is not provider centric but app developer centric. Not every app will expose an API but most will use one. This is why we've built Apigee (http://www.apigee.com). So yes, there's a growing market for API proxies. There are a number of players in this market, including Sonoa (my company), Mashery, 3Scale, Webservius, and I expect that there will be others soon. Each has its own focus areas and features. Apache Synapse can perform similar functions but was not designed with this use case in mind. Additionally, not just webapp developers but any app developer - including iPhone app developers, for example - who uses 3rd party APIs will benefit from an API proxy. Finally, the idea of the separation of concerns is important but most of my experience with this pattern (business policy vs. business logic) is from the API provider's perspective. My thoughts on this are posted here: http://blog.sonoasystems.com/detail/business-logic_vs._business_policy_in_cloud_services_and_apis/.

@Chris M - We'll have to wait and see what projects are offered to the CodePlex Foundation to determine what the primary focus will be. I hope to see support for Linux as well as Windows. In my experience, open source developers are committed to advancing their own projects as well as those projects that are closely related to them. Free software developers on the other hand are consistently committed to advancing the Linux platform. I should point out that my new company (http://sonoasystems.com) produces cloud computing infrastructure based on Linux. There are plenty of incentives for me personally to ensure that the CodePlex Foundation is technology neutral.

@wrowe - Agreed; the commitment of the CodePlex Foundation is to increase contribution to open source projects. We do not claim to be, and are not, a FLOSS organization. We are not opposed to FLOSS/FOSS software technologies or licenses, including the GPLv3. We are in favor of software companies contributing to open source community projects.

@Chris M - I'm not aligned with the recommendations you're making. The Free Software Foundation has been established for many years and is committed to the goals that you laid out in your post. The CodePlex Foundation's goal is to increase contribution from software companies to open source projects. Whether or not the particular open source project is "free" according to the FSF's 4 freedoms is orthogonal to that goal. What I laid out in this post is in support of exactly that - whether or not a given open source software project is "free as in freedom" has no bearing on whether or not it is or can be commercialized.