I do not think to have ever stated that Canonical’s cloud strategy is entirely open source. In order to sustain and keep investing in Ubuntu’s growth, Canonical must develop revenue streams, and while some of those are service only revenue, some others are based on SaaS offerings which are not necessarily open source. These offerings are always optional and do not prevent anyone from using Ubuntu in its entirety, and there are always competing offers providing similar additional services.

In terms of “guerrilla-way”, Ubuntu Server Edition is the only enterprise class distribution that offers free 5 years maintenance including thousands of packages with a complete solution to build your own cloud infrastructure. This is not a negligible investment and already allows many similar scenarios to those you describe.

I fully endorse the Ubuntu One business model and view it as a means to help us further fund the great new work on Ubuntu.

This opens the question if Canonical truly believes in business concepts/offers built on free software? The Ubuntu One could emerge to an exchange-killer-app if it was possible to be deployed on local servers. Giving the organisation the choice to outsource or run their own are much stronger than for example Googles offer. Giving the IT-people the opportunity to deploy Ubuntu solutions the guerilla way, from ground up witch is the traditional method for challengers. And not to forget giving organisations and individuals incitament to attend in the community round the product.

Why not run Ubuntu One as open as rest of Ubuntu and build a business offer like Landscape or what MySQL do (sells safeness) besides as a paid service?