Red Hat alleges that the infinity sign on the blue suitcase of DataPortability.org and the green and white infinity sign at the top of the site are "identical to the Fedora Infinity design logo owned by Red Hat."

Believe it or not, the above are not the logo for Red Hat's Fedora product, the following is.

Ok, so if those look alike it's because they all use the symbol for infinity. Red Hat isn't going to claim to own the symbol for infinity, is it? A request for comment hasn't been responded to yet, we'll see if the company has anything more to say. Meanwhile, a discussion concerning how to respond has begun on the DataPortability.org mailing list.

Outlaw pretzel image above used by, apparently illegitimate, CC license from Flickr user Oskay.

DevPay offers a lot of flexibility for developers, allowing users to create their own pricing plan "using any combination of one-time charges, recurring monthly charges, and metered Amazon Web Service usage." Beyond automatically determining usage, sending out bills, and handling payment processing, DevPay also handles the courtesies such as email notifications -- all of which are customizable via the API.

Amazon's first customer for their new service is Red Hat, who is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 via DevPay.

There was some initial confusion about the difference between DevPay and Amazon's Flexible Payment Service, which allows web sites to receive payments. "I'm still not clear on what the difference is from Amazon FPS. Is it specifically the ability to meter AWS usage? If so, why not simply build this into FPS?" wrote commenter A. Logan Murray on Amazon's announcement post.

The difference, according to Amazon, is that while FPS allows developers to charge for any sort of service, DevPay specifically hooks into the AWS. When you use DevPay to charge users for S3 usage, for example, the payments are made directly to Amazon and then deducted from your S3 bill (with the remainder being deposited into your Amazon account). DevPay cuts out the middleman -- your customers are paying Amazon directly for the web services they are using.

DevPay is priced at $.30 per transaction + 3% of the total amount billed. That's a bit higher than PayPal, but because it can also do the legwork of calculating how much your customers owe you based on how much they use, DevPay should be a very attractive way for developers to charge customers for AWS usage. Like other Amazon services, this one is only available in the US right now.