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Cloud Driving Microsoft To Open Source?
Julie188 writes "Sam Ramji thinks the days where Microsoft's, (and Apple's, and Oracle's) love-hate relationship with open source are numbered, thanks to the cloud. Whereas some open source advocates say the cloud may kill open source, because users won't have access to the source, Ramji says the cloud will be its salvation. Ramji, Microsoft's original internal open source dude, thinks companies building clouds won't be able to keep up if they don't participate in open source communities because that's where the developers building new cloud infrastructure are doing most of their work. The main concerns standing in the way for both cloud builders and users of free software are legal fears, he contends. These include fears of the GPL's copyleft provision and fears of being sued by downstream users. Is he right ... or full of FUD?"
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The kernel in Windows 9 will be Linux.
Steve Jobs will be reincarnated as a Pony.
Obama will get us out of Afghanistan, balance the budget and move Wall Street to a FEMA trailer court outside of Biluxi, Mississippi.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Microsoft will most likely keep their business model that they have had for almost 40 years - in its very nature, their business model does not shift to new Ideas, but shifts the new Ideas into that model.
Well, here's how things work with the (BSD-licensed) PostgreSQL community:
Lots of people develop and share code. Some companies release proprietary, closed source versions. For example, EnterpriseDB offers Oracle compatibility above what the community wants, and therefore finds a niche market in those who are migrating from Oracle. Green Plum offers a parallel-based BI version. However on the whole these companies contribute back everything the community would actually accept or want in order to minimize the headaches of maintaining it themselves.
So when we talk about adapting open source, that's the model that comes to mind: sharing everything one can to reduce costs of code maintenance, while keeping whatever the community doesn't want as part of the company's own product offerings.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
To be honest, I don't like the whole idea of SaaS at all, which is what this "cloud" computing is. In the end all it does is take control away from the user, regardless of the software being open or not. I can see it being used for a business so that employees can take their work home with them, but once you start trusting others with your data, you're going down a dangerous path.
Absolutely. I can't tell you how many small businesses I've worked with that are franchisees and one of the big selling points is that they won't have to manage an internal network. The franchise company handles the whole vertical market app (such as dispatch software for service companies) including storing the data. I ask them: what happens if your internet access goes down? How are you going to find our where your techs are supposed to be? What about if the hosting company for the parent company goes down? Or, worst case scenario, you get in a conflict with the parent company and they don't release your data to you. You're out of business. Even if you had the data you don't have the app to read it. Trust me, this is being tried by a lot of franchise type companies and it's not going to be a happy ending for someone. The franchises aren't stupid, they know control of the data is control of the franchisee.
If you are in I-T, just fucking shut up about Apple. You just keep saying stupid fucking things. How is WebKit a love/hate relationship with open source? How is shipping the only name brand PC with open source software on it a love/hate relationship with open source? Fuck. So stupid.
It's already here.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
errm...could it be because of MS's past history of tying everything in their ecosystem? Might that have something to do with it?
In other words, it isn't that open sourcers make everything about open source, it is more MS has made everything they touch about MS and the principle feature they use is closed source and its ancillary ill-effects. Care to explain why MS treats everything not MS as an enemy, how they posit their tools as this- or that-killers?
Or will they stay because MS doesn't allow them to download all their documents or transfer them to another service (or allows them to be downloaded, but they're in proprietary formats that are useless for migration purposes anyway)?
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
I think you are taking things to an extreme nobody even in the Middle Ages would have agreed with.
The points I make here are about control of your own data. This is an important point. If your internet connection goes down, that's bad. But if you lose your data permanently this is often something that can easily make a business go under, not to mention cause legal problems when filing for taxes, etc. If you control your data, you control your business. How you reach that data is secondary. If you are running a PostgreSQL server on Amazon's cloud but taking nightly backups onto your site, that's one thing. If you are trusting your data to Cloud Apps R Us and have no direct access to backups, that's bad news.
Additionally in many cases, there could be additional issues. Consider the case of credit card data, for example, and PCI-DSS compliance.....
I am not saying not to use cloud computing. I am saying to stay in control of your data. One of my customers, for example, runs their web servers for business apps in Amazon's cloud and then connects from there back to database servers running in their own network. I see this as reasonably responsible. If Amazon decides to screw them, they could deploy inhouse quickly and with no data loss.
Often asking the questions is more important than pontificating answers.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP