Will open source be lost in clouds in 2009?

The loss of control implied by cloud computing, which may have been inconceivable in 2008, may become much more appealing in 2009.

(My son took this picture on a hiking trip in the Smokies this summer. So credit John F. Blankenhorn.)

The Yankee Group sent over an e-mail recently predicting this will take the form of desktop virtualization.

Mass workforce consolidations as a result of the economic downturn, especially in the financial services market, will force enterprises to look for ways to provision vast amounts of desktops to absorbed workforces in a fast, cheap and secure manner.

I, for one, welcome our new virtual overlords. The best way to make sure the new minions are on the same page is to push the pages to them. They're easier to pull back when you later push the people out the door.

Open source is seen as very very good in the cloud, and the cloud is seen as being very very good to open source. It's really an extension of the enterprise market, where professionals see the value in writing checks so they can play grill the coder.

So how much of the market will cloud computing take in 2009? And how much of the cloud will be on open source?