Mozilla is complaining that Microsoft is impeding its Firefox web browser from getting on the devices being designed to carry the unseen next-generation Windows for ARM chip, now officially called Windows RT.

RT, which has a Metro environment for tablets and phones, as well as a classic Windows interface, won’t support legacy apps like the x86 version of Windows 8 and programs that run on it will only be available Apple-like from Microsoft’s store.

Developers who support RT will only be able to use the Windows runtime stack and standard APIs. Microsoft claims that’s for reasons of security, performance and battery life. It’s supposedly typical of ARM. But it means third-party browsers, which need more than the standard APIs, won’t be supported in the classic desktop mode.

So, Mozilla’s general counsel Harvey Anderson dusted off some old familiar one-a-monopoly-always-a-monopoly rhetoric Wednesday and said this “restricts user choice, reduces competition and chills innovation” and represents an “unwelcome return to the digital dark ages” and put his statement on Mozilla’s web site.

He figures if IE can run on RT there’s no technical reason why other browsers can’t.

He seems less worried about the smartphones and tablets RT will run on initially. He’s looking into the future when ARM is built into PCs and laptops, even servers, maybe, and possibly becomes a big business. And – after reminding Microsoft of the so-called Windows Principles it subscribed in 2006 basically saying third-party software could be used as the default – it didn’t take Anderson long to get to the “antitrust implications” of the matter.

“If Windows on ARM is simply another version of Windows on new hardware, it also runs afoul of the EC browser choice commitments and seems to represent the very behavior the DOJ-Microsoft settlement sought to prohibit,” he said.

“The prospect that the next generation of Windows on ARM devices would limit users to one browser is untenable and represents a first step toward a new platform lock-in….We encourage Microsoft to remain firm on its user choice principles and reject the temptation to pursue a closed path. The world doesn’t need another closed proprietary environment and Microsoft has the chance to be so much more.”

It doesn’t seem to matter that Apple won’t let Firefox run on iOS Microsoft is dragging around antitrust chains like Marley’s ghost.

Ars Technica, for one, while admitting “the issue raises some difficult questions” down the line, says, “The policies that Microsoft has established for Windows RT seem reasonable today when considered in the context of how the platform is intended to be used. Demanding support for Firefox on Windows RT is a lot like asking for Opera on a Chromebook or WebKit on Mozilla’s own Boot2Gecko platform – it would conflict with the underlying purpose of the platform.”

Mozilla gets most of its funding from Google and Google, with its Chrome browser, is standing with Mozilla.

See http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/05/09/windows-on-arm-users-need-browser-choice-too/.

Facebook set Open Compute in train a year ago to solve problems it was having trying to shoehorn the compute, storage and networking density it needed into the traditional server rack, a form factor its hardware master calls “blades gone bad.”

Blades supposedly go bad because of what OCP founding board member Andy Bechtolsheim calls “gratuitous differentiation” on the part of vendors and their lock-in-seeking proprietary designs that sacrifice interoperability.

Open Rack is about standardizing the electrical and mechanical interfaces in a rack and saving power. It is based on an airier OpenU (OU) that’s 48mm high instead of the old 44.5mm U so everything can breath and there can be better cable management and more efficient use of the space.

The Open Rack frame is still a familiar and reassuring 24-inch wide but the slot inside is 21-inch wide (though existing 19-inch equipment can still be accommodated). The wider bay can fit three two-socket motherboards or five 3.5-inch disk drives side-by-side.

It’s supposed to lower TCO by lengthening the compute components’ lifespan and reducing industrial waste. OCP imagines that whole servers won’t have to be replaced every two-and-a-half years, just the components, some of which could be good for 10 years. And when Intel or AMD come out with a new dingus just the processor gets upgraded.

Servers won’t have their own power supplies anymore either. They’ll plug into a 12V bus bar at the back of the rack that in turn connects to power shelves in each rack. Bye-bye cables.

Open Rack has three sizes: a triple rack, a single rack and a half rack. Facebook fancies the roomier triple rack.

HP and Dell have new so-called “clean sheet” server and storage designs compatible with Open Rack specification. HP’s is called Project Coyote and Dell’s is called Zeus.

Coyote uses two Xeon E5 processors and is supposed to represent a power savings of up to 50% compared to standard racks. Dell’s widgetry mixes different kinds of servers and storage.

HP, the world’s largest server maker, and Quanta, the world’s largest contract manufacturer, have just joined OCP. So have AMD, Fidelity Investments, Salesforce.com, VMware, Canonical, Avnet, Alibaba, Supermicro, Cloudscaling and Tencent. IBM is still being stand-offish.

HP, Quanta and Tencent have joined the OCP Incubation Committee, which reviews proposed projects to determine whether they should receive official OCP support. The committee is already considering a Facebook design for a “vanity-free” storage server code-named Knox and what are supposed highly efficient motherboard designs for financial services companies from AMD and Intel. AMD’s is called Roadrunner and Intel’s is called Decathlete.

Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s VP of hardware design and supply chain and OPC chairman and president, says they’re also “mapping out a convergence between Open Rack and Project Scorpio, a similar spec under development by the Chinese Internet giants Tencent and Baidu. They expect the two specs to merge next year.

VMware is promising to certify its vSphere virtualization platform to run on OCP gear, and DDN says it will do the same with its WOS storage system. Canonical means to certify its widgetry for OCP servers before the designs are released.

And there’s now an OCP Solutions Provider program that’s supposed to help companies “sell and consume technology based on Open Compute Project designs.” Hyve, ZT Systems, Avnet and new business units at Quanta and Wistron called QCT and Wiwynn, respectively have been launched to sell directly to consumers and are in line for Solutions Provider status.

Frankovsky said in a blog posting that “The momentum that has gathered behind the project – especially in the last six months – has been nothing short of amazing.”

Everyone agrees it has Amazon, particularly, and VMware, to a certain extent, in mind. However, what’ll probably end up happening is that Red Hat, which has a prominent part in the open source OpenStack project that Rackspace started, becomes the “Linux of the cloud” because it’s got all the pieces, or thinks it does, but that’s another story.

Anyway, Rackspace is inching out with a production-ready OpenStack cloud based on Essex, the fifth and best-yet release of the open source cloud platform put in train by Rackspace and NASA in the summer of 2010.

Rackspace CEO Louis Napier told a New York Times blog that he expects to have all his customers, by then perhaps 200,000 businesses, on some or all of an OpenStack system by summer.

The fight is supposed to come down to a dual between the proprietary Amazon APIs, now lauded as the de facto standard of public clouds, and the still immature but open source CloudStack APIs.

Rackspace says come May 1, in roughly two weeks time, it will begin providing customers with default access to widgetry that it’s now got in “limited availability.”

That includes:

* Cloud Servers, the Essex-based EC2-like compute piece of OpenStack, a k a Nova, accessible through the new programmable OpenStack API for switching between OpenStack clouds or a new intuitive control panel.

* A built-from-the-ground-up graphical Control Panel that allows server tagging to discriminate between production and development servers so they can be controlled in concert and has multi-region capabilities.

Rackspace says “limited availability” means customers can sign up now, the widgetry is reportedly production workload-ready, there are unspecified SLAs, 24×7 support and regular billing. It seems it could take Rackspace a couple, few months to ensure a smooth ramp-up but the move is supposed to be imperceptible.

Rackspace, which has already got the S3-like Cloud Files storage, a k a Swift, will move all of its public, private and hybrid cloud to this widgetry.

It’s also got stuff in “early access” defined as “production workload-ready but with limited support available, no service commitments and no billing.

They include:

* OpenStack Cloud Databases (Project Red Dwarf) with API access to a massively scalable, highly available MySQL database with redundant SAN storage for high performance and automated management. Figure on Microsoft SQL Server and other databases too but maybe not from Rackspace. Amazon, of course, has the MySQL-derived Relational Data Service (RDS).

* Single-view Cloud Monitoring of the infrastructure and applications based on Rackspace’s acquisition of Cloudkick.

Lastly it’s got early versions of products in “preview” looking for testers namely:

* OpenStack Cloud Block Storage, like Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS), but offering either solid state or lower-cost disk storage.

* Cloud Networks, software-defined virtual networks for managing logically abstracted network services programmatically. IDC says Rackspace’s Cloud Networks is “going to eliminate some of the hesitation businesses have around cloud adoption.” Thank you Cisco et al.

Rudimentary pricing will remain the same starting at $0.015 cents an hour for a Linux virtual server with 10GB of disk space and 256MB of RAM and $0.08 an hour for Windows.

Rackspace still has to say what the database, storage and networking will ultimately run.

HP, a chief OpenStack acolyte, won’t have a beta take on the Essex platform memorialized in its HP Cloud Services until May 10 with no estimates, as of last week, on when it could have a production public cloud.

There will be OpenStack fragmentation, observers prophecy. HP won’t return all the distinguishing tweaks it makes to the community.

Rackspace says on its web site that it’s got more than 170,000 businesses and 60% of the Fortune 100 as customers.

See www.rackspace.com/nextgen.

It said it had distilled all the years of experience it got from tens of thousands of customer engagements around the world – and nobody can compete with that – into a box, an “expert integrated system” that it made every conceivable marketing claim about, beginning with making everything utterly simple.

It said it was a snap to deploy, cuts application deployment time from maybe, say, six months all told to a month, and uses self-healing intelligent software to install, maintain, update and monitor itself and all its parts from operating systems through to applications to cut support costs.

Blessedly the thing reportedly doesn’t need ham-fingered human intervention so IT can go off and do cleverer, creative things because it’s no longer worried about just keeping the lights on and spending 70% of its budget on maintenance.

The nimble miracle box is called PureSystems – which makes it sound like it’s been through some sort of ritual bath – and it’s supposed to put IBM at the head of the next technology curve.

What it is is an all-in-one converged (or bundled) architecture that – like stuff IBM’s rivals HP, Oracle, Cisco et al are churning out in the fight for control of the data center – combines server, storage, networking and management in a single system.

It means using standardized configurations and pre-installed application “patterns” that “convert technology expertise into reusable, downloadable packages.”

And of course there’s a cloud angle. There’s always a cloud angle these days. Puresystems apps can run in-house or up there in the cloud, to start with, on IBM’s own SmartCloud to, say, test and develop, and reportedly it happens at the press of a button.

Integration with other clouds is supposed to be on the way, although a public cloud like Amazon still sure looks like the easy way out.

IBM is trying to keep the argument to the private cloud. It says it can “stand up a private cloud system in minutes” and calls Puresystems a “cloud system in box” with no single point of failure. IBM said it included a cloud self-service interface directly into PureSystems to accelerate the use of the cloud.

Puresystems is reportedly the product of a four-year effort that cost $2 billion – and is supposed to solve all of IT’s pressing problems today.

It’s got 125 ISVs behind the machine with 150 or so odd packages optimized for PureSystems – except Oracle, which has its own fish to fry since its two-year-old Sun acquisition and subsequent move into so-called engineered systems like Exadata and Exalytics that compete with IBM.

Otherwise the willing include Microsoft, SugarCRM, Infor, Red Hat, SAP and Siemens, who are now all PureSystems-ready, beating Oracle in the variety department at least.

IBM says PureSystems can handle twice as many applications as other technology, doubling the computing power per square foot of data center space.

IBM is also supposed to have 500 system integrator and solution providers ready to push the stuff.

The rack-based server widgetry on offer runs on either x86 or IBM’s own Power 7 chips running Linux, Windows or IBM’s AIX Unix. To prove it’s not a proprietary lock-in it uses VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat or IBM PowerV virtualization.

It’s supposed to configure thousands of VMs, “twice the density of previous systems,” “slashing software licensing costs by upwards of 70%.”

Pricing reportedly begins at $100,000 and availability is set for June.

The widgetry includes an infrastructure system called PureFlex and a platform system called PureApplication. PureFlex handles security from the ground up, networking with an eye to virtualization and the cloud, the virtualization itself and the ability to burst to the cloud. PureApplication involves IBM’s institutional smarts or workload patterns; Platform-as-a-Service; and support for Java, Ruby and PHP.

First, it dumped its OpenStack distribution, Project Olympus, in the garbage.

Then it took CloudStack, an asset it spent somewhere between $200 million and $250 million to acquire nine months ago, and turned it over lock, stock and every last shred of legally unfettered proprietary code to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which has nurtured Hadoop, Hive and Cassandra/

ASF will incubate CloudStack as an open source rival to OpenStack and a foil to proprietary VMware, Citrix’ hereditary enemy.

And then it loudly proclaimed to anybody who would listen that Amazon’s proprietary APIs are the de facto standard and that CloudStack would fully embrace Amazon compatibility.

The move puts CloudStack in competition with Eucalyptus Systems, the open source private cloud peddler that just cut a deal with Amazon that was years in the making to guarantee that its Amazon EC2 and S3 APIs are in prefect pitch with Amazon’s APIs so that companies can have a private cloud that gracefully migrates workloads to Amazon.

Considering which side its probably-now-billion-dollar bread is buttered on, Amazon doesn’t like private clouds, but by bringing Eucalyptus into the fold it has conceded that it has to tolerate hybrid clouds to get more enterprise business. It’s betting that over time the enterprise will get so accustomed to Amazon they’ll abandon their currently safer private clouds.

The unique Eucalyptus licensing deal with Amazon, a boon to both, might not be exclusive, but it also might not be something Amazon is ready to duplicate right quick, leaving CloudStack adherents to worry about broken interoperability and the possible infringement of its clones.

Undaunted, the general manager of Citrix’ Cloud Platforms Group Sameer Dholakia says, “Amazon has invented and created this market, and with what is projected to be $1 billion in ecosystem and customer revenue attached to Amazon cloud, we believe the winning cloud platform will have to have a high degree of interoperability with Amazon.” (No vendor-neutral agonizing or carping over who controls the standard or how it’s developed there though there’s at least one untrusting call for Amazon to define an Amazon Community Process.)

Citrix, which was among the first of what are now 150 companies to rally to the open source Rackspace-NASA OpenStack project two years ago, said it can’t wait around another year or two for the immature OpenStack to get debugged, stable and feature-complete like vCloud when CloudStack – which was supposed to be integrated into OpenStack – is production-ready and scalable.

OpenStack, it said, wasn’t responding to customer needs.

The OpenStack community of, shall we say, um, “free spirits” ultimately rejected the idea of integrating CloudStack completely, and evidently Citrix had problems with the politics of OpenStack, which has vendors like Dell, Cisco and HP (and maybe IBM) behind it, while service providers tend to fancy CloudStack and have deployed it for real, which is more than OpenStack can say.

Citrix also complained that, although OpenStack pays lip service to the Amazon APIs, it prefers its own APIs, something that older and wiser heads close to OpenStack say will ultimately have to change, attributing it to the naïveté of the purists in the OpenStack community.

It’s also possible that Citrix really, really, really wants to sell more XenServer to justify the $500 million or so it blew buying XenSource a few years ago.

In the interests of XenServer, Citrix is going to hang on the periphery of the KVM-leaning OpenStack and make contributions to see its hypervisor supported.

Meanwhile, CloudStack 3.0 is going to trade in its GPL 3 open source license for the friendlier Apache 2.0 license, making it the first cloud platform to sport an Apache license – which should prove attractive to both companies and the many developers in the Apache community.

Citrix also gets to say that CloudStack is sheltering in a legitimate, neutral foundation not an interests-controlled one like OpenStack’s.

CloudStack has 50-odd software merchants and SPs – like BT, Engine Yard, GoDaddy and Korea Telecom – supporting it and upwards of a hundred clouds is production, some reportedly with tens of thousands of servers that are reportedly generating more than a billion dollars for their owners. It’s also got 30,000 community members and reportedly thousands of certified apps. It also picked up a big OpenStack defector, NTT DoCoMo, the giant Japanese telco.

While hoping for and positioning itself for broad adoption, sources say Citrix’ real reason for contributing CloudStack to Apache was to retain this following, which obviously might be uncomfortable with a purely Citrix-led defection from OpenStack despite the clear superiority of the compute part of CloudStack.

Amusingly, Citrix allows that the Java-based CloudStack might someday suck up some mature parts of the Python-based OpenStack.

What is probably going to happen is that CloudStack winds up a hybrid mixture of its own compute and OpenStack’s prized S3-mimicking “Swift” storage contributed by Rackspace.

At least the smart money among the CloudStack contingent is expected to do that, leaving folks like the perennially benighted and ponderous HP up a creek as usual.

Anyway, as a way to get some of its money back, Citrix said it will continue to offer a commercially supported Apache CloudStack distribution tuned to XenServer (which, by the way, offers indemnification, hmmm) and spend millions of dollars on engineering and marketing. It will have to to be heard over the OpenStack hoopla.

In its attempt to position CloudStack to become the “de facto of cloud computing platforms,” Citrix said it would become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Oh, yeah, Eucalyptus’ IaaS, by the way, has 100 paying customers and, say, about 25,000 downloads 10% of which are regarded as serious.

Gartner called the Citrix defection a “bombshell,” the beginning of “the war for open source clouds.”

See CloudStack.org community.