Cloud Wars the Game

I like games.  I have never played WoW but I used to dabble in Eve Online.  The problem for me was that these games require a significant time investment that deep down I always feel isn’t quite right.  Instead of spending 3 hours a night building a virtual company inside the Eve world, wouldn’t I somehow be better served trying to build a company in the real world?  Inevitably this leads me (and I am sure countless others) to wonder if there is some kind of game that could serve both purposes; suspend reality while being productive in reality.  I am sure such games exist.

Today while doing some research for my open source momentum project I found myself comparing the various cloud computing platforms (Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, etc).  Cloud computing was all the rage in 2009 and I presume more of the same for 2010.  I am in the market for a platform on which to learn Erlang.  I stumbled across some nice Erlang AMIs at Hypothetical Labs so I decided to try EC2 for a while.  As my shiny new Erlang server booted up for the first time I began to wonder… would it be possible to play games in these clouds? 

Here is what I am thinking:

• Games (wars) are open to any number of teams.
• Each team can choose any cloud platform and any technologies they want with which to participate.
• Each game will have a goal or series of goals agreed upon up front that are somehow relevant to the real world (solve a hard problem, create new technology, etc)
• Each team can strive to achieve the goals using their cloud any way they wish.
• Each team can strive to prevent competitors from achieving the goals anyway they wish (except for DoS attacks of course!).
• All technology employed in the game must be open source.  New technologies created during the game must be open sourced within 6 months of being introducted into the game.
• Each team must fund its platform\technology with money earned using that platform\technology.  So for instance, if my Amazon cloud costs $1 per day per server, then my cloud must earn 1$ per day per server via donations or ad revenue or service offerings, etc. 

We would have to formalize these rules and I am sure there are others but this might be a fun way to play with open source technologies and combine them in different ways while trying to see what  some of these cloud platforms are made of. 

Anybody want to play?

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1. Building Momentum with Linux and Erlang