For reasons it won't explain EMC has bought some of the assets of SourceLabs - what exactly it won't say - and hired some of its people - who exactly it won't comment on - for its opaque Cloud Infrastructure Business. That's the unit that'll be run by Harel Kodesh, the ex-Microsoft veteran EMC just hired a couple of weeks ago out of Amdocs, the telecom billing, CRM and order management ISV and outsourcer.

SourceLabs, which had Microsoft connections despite its open source bent, continues to operate as a standalone business, EMC said. However, SourceLabs CEO Byron Sebastian and its chief architect Will Pugh will apparently be joining EMC. What remains will still have SWiK.net, the open source project dedicated to documenting open source software, although a published report had the company trying to sell that too lately.

Blogs that don't bother checking have EMC buying all of SourceLabs (close but no cigar) and sticking it in its newfangled Decho operation where Mozy, its cloud backup service, now lives, making them wrong on both counts.

EMC described the purchase as "very small."

SourceLabs got $10.5 million from Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners and Index Venture in two rounds in 2004 and 2006.

Its stock in trade has been solving Linux and Java problems by automating diagnostics and troubleshooting complements of a knowledge base as well as management software for large open source environments, something a cloud infrastructure can surely use, especially if it was going to take on Amazon.

• Google, Akamai, and VMware: Cloud Computing's Top Three?
• Microsoft's Old Number Three Turns Up at EMC on a Cloud
• Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Call For Papers Deadline
• The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing