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Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle For Cloud Relevance

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the someone-get-a-rock-and-a-sling dept.

A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."

6 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Too many anaologies in the summary by sakdoctor · · Score: 5, Funny

    But if open-source can hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

    1. Re:Too many anaologies in the summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      You know by tattling on your friends, you're really just tattling on yourself. By tattling on your friends, you're just telling them that you're a tattletale. Now is that the tale you want to tell?

    2. Re:Too many anaologies in the summary by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 3, Funny

      For some reason my brain automatically did this:
      <Zap_Branigan>

      But if open-source can hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

      </Zap_Branigan>

      --
      [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
  2. Re:Battle with what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    most of Google's and Amazon's could are run by Linux / BSD with costume modifications

    Making everything a dictionary word != spell correction. Turn it off, it's making things worse.

  3. Re:Crybaby by Adm.Wiggin · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...but I only eat vegetables and fruits that were cultivated lovingly by John Deere! What else could be more relevant?!

  4. Re:OSS also not a big player in cheeseburger marke by sound+vision · · Score: 1, Funny

    Your weather.com systray icon isn't cloud computing, because it only shows the temperature. If it could display the radar maps showing cloud cover, THAT would be true cloud computing.