Next week I am headed to London, England for a conference called "Cloudexpoeurope" run by my old friend Maggie Meer, publisher of LinuxUser Magazine. Maggie is one of those people who is as tough as nails, but with a heart of gold.

This will be my first conference dedicated solely to "cloud computing", and while I generally agree with a lot of what cloud computing promises, I also feel that Free Software is absolutely necessary for cloud computing to be used as a tool, but I also recognize that cloud computing is not the only tool.

Like a lot of other things, cloud computing takes planning. On the other hand, once that planning is done correctly, cloud computing promises a lot of flexibility in where you run and where you display your applications. If you build your applications and infrastructure well, you could use compute and storage engines from either inside your own environment, from a remote hosted site, or a combination of both.

You should have the flexibility to store and access your data remotely, from a local server or from a pen drive stuck in your desktop system.

Likewise you should be able to display to your LCD on your desk, your high definition TV at home, or your cell phone. Of course careful planning would prevent trying to display lots of information on a tiny, tiny screen, and prevent interception of that data by people who you do not really like (and who don't like you) but those are some of the issues that I am sure this conference will address.

Since a lot of the companies who are sponsors for this event (including Linux New Media, the publishers of LinuxPro Magazine) are "Free and Open Source Software" advocates, I should not find too much opposition to what I have to say, but I have found that some people's ideas of "Open" are a bit different than my idea of "Open" (to say nothing of the concept of "Free"), so it should still be an interesting time with interesting discussions.

Speaking of FREE, the conference is without charge. All that Maggie asks you to do is register ahead of time for the conference , study which sessions you wish to attend and register for them.

My talk is in the Afternoon session of the Technical Track on May 20th. Maybe I will see you there.