This week’s poll is inspired our friends at CloudAve. Krishnan Subramanian wrote a post today about open-sourcing data center design.

It’s about time, isn’t it? Subramanian best point comes down to what is happening right now in the cloud computing world. The enthusiasm for cloud computing is such that there is no time to waste.

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Subramanian writes:

“Compared to other fields of IT, the innovation on the data center front is relatively slow because the industry as a whole is slow to change. With cloud computing capturing the imagination of enterprises and public, It is important to innovate rapidly on the data center side.”

We know the role open-source is playing in cloud computing. Just look at the role that Hadoop and Eucalyptus are playing in cloud computing.

But opening up the data center is a different story. It may be the last frontier and the key for opening up the enterprise to open-source initiatives.

The Open Source Data Center Initiative seems like it sees that potential. The group is challenging the powers of the engineering world by collaborating and pooling information that goes into designing and ultimately constructing data centers.

That’s pretty interesting.

So, here’s our question this week:

Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?trends

Last Week’s Poll: What is the top threat to cloud computing?

Last week’s poll had 244 people respond.

Top response: API’s and a poor interface. API’s are causing headaches for at least one of the leading cloud service providers.

We’ll have more later about troublesome API’s. In the meantime, what do you think? Is there a place for open-source in the data center?

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The Associated Press (AP) is saying it hopes to negotiate more lucrative licensing deals with major web sites. Reporting for the AP itself, Michale Liedtke says that AP CEO Tom Curley discussed possible revenue initiatives to protect online content.

Here are some key facts from the Liedtke’s piece: 

- Curley said after lowering its fees for U.S. newspapers by $30 million this year, the AP will reduce fees by a total of $45 million for newspapers and broadcasters next year. The plan had previously been to lower newspaper fees by $35 million.

- Curley said the AP expects its revenue to decrease both this year and next year.

- The AP intends to cut 10% of its payroll costs by the end of the year. The goal is to achieve this through attrition and early retirement offers, but layoffs haven’t been ruled out

- The AP’s contract with Google expires at the end of the year

- The AP’s four largest online partnerships are with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.

The AP is talking about one idea to get revenue from ads attached to its content that would include bundles of some of the organizations top stories with those of newspapers and broadcasters on different topics. This concept would include AP landing pages that they say could compete with Google News, Yahoo News and MSN.

The AP is also considering charging readers to see some of its online content. What do you think about the ideas the AP is tossing around? Would you pay to view some of the AP’s content?