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To abuse the cloud metaphor, there's a storm brewing over public and private clouds. Not surprisingly, providers of public clouds (who hope to see everybody move their computing to public clouds) are quick to dismiss private clouds. One of the best reads today is from the ActiveState blog, where Bart Copeland takes on the idea that private clouds are "vapor." Also, OpenStack's usage accounting system is coming into shape and why you can't live migrate VMs between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2 to 6.1.

Eucalyptus was once "the" open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu's cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn't developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

This week, SUSE announced that it had joined OpenStack and today the company announced a development preview of SUSE Cloud which is powered by OpenStack. With the green team at SUSE behind OpenStack, along with Canonical, does that make OpenStack the de facto open source cloud? Not so fast – I wouldn't count Red Hat out just yet.

Ask, and you shall receive. Well, maybe. Today Red Hat announced that it is opening up a discussion group to ask what customers want in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.

RHEL 6 was released late last year, and RHEL 6.1 came out in May. It will be a while before RHEL 7 sees light of day, but now is as good a time as any to start getting customer feedback for the next release.

Add Sprint to the telcos looking to get into the cloud services market. According to Roger Cheng, Sprint will be offering "hosted collaboration services" to small and medium-sized businesses using its data center to provide capacity.

A recent report from Gartner details a spike the firm observed in the number of search queries for the term "PaaS" from users of its website. Independent researcher Louis Columbus summarizes the report on his blog. He notes that at Gartner, search terms are considered a leading indicator of future IT spending.

The number of searches for PaaS on Gartner.com spiked from around 250 in December to over 700 in January, and have remained between 650-700 in February and March.

The economy is depressing but there's no shortage of cool new individual hires in tech to report already this year. Mozilla, Dell, AOL Sports and some of our favorite startups have picked up new engineers and executives this week. The biggest tech job news of the New Year, though, may be that Lifehacker's long time editor Gina Trapani announced yesterday that she's leaving her position.

Check out some of the young year's first highlights in tech hiring as reported by our site Jobwire below. Jobwire is sponsored by VisualCV, which is a service for job seekers. Jobwire reports on 10 to 15 completed new hires in tech and new media every weekday.