We’ve covered the significance of open source software in cloud computing, both with the emergence of cloud models and more recently from the perspective of customers. In the first weeks of 2010, we see open source is maintaining, if not growing, its role in cloud computing. There are also indications open source and its use are evolving in the cloud.

While we’ve seen open source software used both to build cloud computing infrastructure and offered among cloud computing services, we had thought that the building of clouds with open source may be the greater opportunity given typical and historical adoption and use patterns. However, we are seeing continued examples of additional open source offerings in the cloud.

One such example is MuleSoft’s new offer of Tomcat application server via the GoGrid cloud. The product, MuleSoft Cloudcat, consists of cloud-based Apache Tomcat on GoGrid with commercial support from MuleSoft.

We’re also seeing examples of new open source software for the cloud. We’ve covered the use of unpaid, community Linux in the cloud, but a new cloud-specific distribution, CloudLinux, may also have some interesting implications, particularly for hosters and other service providers. CloudLinux, compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone CentOS, is commercially backed and supported by a company of the same name.

Cloud services and software are not the only sign of open source’s continued prominence in cloud computing. Also showing us that open source is maturing along with cloud computing: a new partnership between Terracotta and Eucalyptus. These two open source cloud players obviously see the benefits of working together and they’ll be integrating technology and teaming on sales and marketing.

We’ve also seen recently that the community aspects of open source continue to hold importance in cloud computing. In response to a perceived movement away from open source, a project dubbed OpenECP has forked from Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform. Citing ‘abrupt commercialization in November 2009,’ OpenECP backers indicate they will maintain free availability and provide community support. Interestingly, the OpenECP project chose to license it under the Affero GPLv3, and we’re watching licensing moves to see if cloud computing prompts more use of AGPL.

All of this shows how open source continues to play a vital role in cloud computing, enabling a wide range of vendors and providers to both build cloud computing infrastructure and applications using open source, and to offer open source via cloud computing to enterprise and other customers.