Piston's announcement follows news from Rackspace and VMware last week, which on the same day announced free and low-cost versions of their cloud software, respectively. Rackspace announced a free tier of its OpenStack-powered private cloud system while VMware offered an easy-sign-up trial for its vCloud public cloud storage service. Earlier this month announced a of its OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service software, which it plans to make generally available through a supported edition sometime next year. Rackspace, Red Hat and Piston have all now released free distributions of OpenStack, which is a free, project in and of itself.

The moves are classic examples of the "freemium" model many Web 2.0 companies employ nowadays, says Krishnan Subramanian, principal analyst at Rishidot Research. "Give away stuff that doesn't impact your bottom line, get them hooked to your platform and then monetize," he describes as the rationale by these vendors. "As the players in OpenStack ecosystem fend off Amazon Web Services, and Google on one side and VMware and other large traditional companies on the other, these giveaways are essential for market adoption. They need to make their [OpenStack-based] products easy and seamless to install but also build a community around their own company."

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.