Hot industry stats, debates on legislation, an Open Source cloud stack and other news of note:

1. Since Congress has started to take up the question of whether airlines need to be transparent about ancillary fees across channels, in order to allow travelers adequately compare real costs of their choices, Timothy O’Neill-Dunne puts forward the definitive answer. Of course no one in Washington is listening, so this drama will surely last longer than the Microsoft Kin (what wouldn’t?).



2. On a related note, Sabre announces that it will update its “Air Total Pricing” system to enable travel agents and consumers see the total price of their trip, inclusive of ancillary fees before they book. The comparison shopping aspect will be addressed first, but the booking and fulfillment portion of the equation probably won’t be solved until later this year.
3. Forrester Cloud Computing analyst James Staten provides his view on Rackspace’s announcement to Open Source their cloud computing stack. NASA may not have found intelligent life out there, but must think the folks at Rackspace are pretty bright because they are amongst the first to deploy the platform.
4. Shortly after being identified as key competitors by Google, heretofore unheralded start ups Everbread and Vayant go mano-a-mano as Vayant alleges copyright infringement.
5. The continuation of a good week for Apple. First they declare there is no Antenna-gate and then they obliterate earnings estimates with their best quarter ever.  iPads almost outsold Macs and it was the most Macs ever sold in a quarter.
6. To patent or not to patent. That is the question. Great article by Pamela Samuelson from Cal-Berkley on why startups decide to patent…or not.
7. TopGuest, a new location-based travel rewards service has a bunch of notable investors, but more importantly nabs a partnership with the InterContinental Priority Club and IHG’s 4,400 properties.
8. Amadeus released preliminary results of their Guide to Ancillary Revenue in association with leading airline ancillary revenue consultancy IdeaWorks. Some good stats if you missed it.
9. While we have our survey out on what you think about the new Open AXIS Group, Professor Sabena gives us his take.
10. An entertaining and insightful view on the upside of newly passed legislation in NY outlawing the use of private dwellings short-term rentals. While decried by many as propping up the large hotel chains, there are real safety, health and security concerns that this bill protects unsuspecting travelers from.

Last week Red Hat’s CTO Brian Stevens introduced a new initiative called Deltacloud that has a very lofty goal of simplifying the process of invoking cloud services via a new unified standard.  It address interoperability which can be an important challenge in cloud computing for ISVs.  Out of the box they have some pretty good market coverage, supporting Red Hat’s own Enterprise Virtualization, VMWare ESX and Amazon EC2 with support for Rackspace to follow.

This is a good start, but I think that this is about as far as Red Hat’s going to be able to take this.  Nowhere is there any mention of, nor do I expect support for, some of the other leading Cloud platforms from Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce.com.  And this highlights the both the problems with the mega-vendors and the open source movement.  Open Source levels the playing field, but that is diametrically opposed to what the mega-vendors like Microsoft and Oracle want, particularly Microsoft who loves their proprietary standards.  And between Microsoft and Oracle, they control so much of the ISV ecosystem, that I don’t see how Red Hat’s Deltacloud gets any traction.  Even Stevens’ own statement talks about “creating a buzz”.  Well maybe for one day.