As cloud computing matures, "people will want to invent and build new features, ones that they then can run anywhere. I think if we just wait around for Amazon to build things, we will have a hard time as an industry," said Lew Moorman, president of hosted service provider Rackspace. "It's not even a criticism of Amazon. What I'm asking for is an open alternative."

Moorman addressed the topic at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco and spoke with IDG News Service after his talk.

Moorman is far from a neutral party. , Rackspace will have a full infrastructure-as-a-service offering that competes with that of Amazon. Rackspace, however, the open-source OpenStack software, which the company .

Because Rackspace is using OpenStack, Moorman argued, customers can move their data and computational elements to another OpenStack service, one that by Hewlett-Packard, for instance. Also, because OpenStack will soon become a stand-alone open-source project, users may have more input as to the kind of new features that get added, he said.

Generally speaking, "lock-in" in this context describes what happens when a customer builds a computing infrastructure on a particular cloud platform, and it becomes difficult, financially and logistically, to move that data and computational logic in-house or to a competing provider. As a result, the provider may increase prices or let the quality of service diminish, knowing that it's hard for customers to switch to another cloud platform.