Yesterday several members of Joyent’s team attended Structure ’08. Jason Hoffman was on a panel that produced some interesting debate about whether clouds should aim to be open. The story was even picked up by the Wall Street Journal’s Don Clark in an article entitled Finding A Friendly Cloud.

Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer of a cloud-computing specialist called Joyent, was particularly pointed in warning that Google’s App Engine could represent a lock-in to developers. It is possible to build “a loving cloud,” he argued, that would make it easier to create applications that could be easily moved among different services. Other panelists kept calling Google’s App Engine “proprietary,” which to many techies is equivalent to labeling it both evil and outdated at the same time.

Here’s video of the exchange Jason had with Google’s Christophe Bisciglia