On Moving Toward Software Rentals

CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an article about the emergence of a service-oriented model of software delivery, supported by the W3C, IBM, HP, and Microsoft. They already have their acronyms down: WSDL (Web Services Description Language), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and WSFL (Web Services Flow Language). The article primarily covers the three phases of negotiating, ending with actual service delivery."

Comments

Licensing for Service Delivery.

[ron_ivi]

This seems an interesting hole in the GPL - use GPL'd technology, but only deliver thing parts of the client to the users; and keep all your GPL-tech-using-yet-proprietary stuff on your server. Since you never "distribute" the server side code, seems it is your to do whatever you want with it.

Is there a need for a new Creative Commons license type that says "if you server services using this technology, I need to share the source"?

I think no existing license covers that need very well today.

Re:"Service Delivery"

[bsharitt]

There's no use in fighting it. They've already got acronyms. When the acronyms come out it's all over.

Software architecture term, not business model

[boatboy]

SOA refers to a method of software architecture that is en vouge- not just a sneaky business model as the post suggests. I'm sure some businesses will jump on the SOA bandwagon for the idea of subscriber-based income, but those that do so for that reason alone will fail.

Web Services, WSDL, etc., all parts of implementing SOA, are essentially ways to provide software services via some network transport (typically HTTP). This makes sense for alot of things. For example, integrating inventory systems in real time. In days gone by, Company A would provide some random way for Company B to access it's inventory/price sheet. Text files, spreadsheets, EDI, etc. All SOA does is apply a machine-readable contract to the process. It says "this server will answer requests that look like ABC with data that looks like XYZ." WSDL, Web Services, etc. are all just about defining that "contract" to cover things like security, data types, etc.

Ironically, this allows for more diversity in the actual implementations. It doesn't matter if your service is provided on a $20,000 HP/W2K3 box running IIS or a $200 Linux box running Apache- as long as it provides a description of it's service, others can consume it- again using whatever language they choose. There are already implementations for most of these standards for Java, PHP, Perl, .NET, C++, and many other languages.

So, put up the tin foil, this isn't a massive conspiracy to get you to pay each time you open your "word processor service." It's just a better way to provide data services where they make sense.