[eblackburn]

I think I'm right in suggesting it's free with a bizspark licence, which is a kind of a free licence available to startups.

Whilst the platform (Azure) is clearly proprietary, they're clearly making efforts to offer cross platform IaaS and cross platform client (OpenSource) capabilities for their PaaS offerings.

It maybe a crock of shite, it maybe the best thing since sliced bread but I for one feel that that particular team deserves credit for trying (hard) to adopt open source and make themselves an attractive proposition outside Microsofts traditional core strengths. Time will tell if they're make a success of this...