Proprietary Software Does Not Scale

It used to be said that open source software does not scale - a reflection of both its immaturity at the time, and of the pious hopes of the proprietary world. Today, the reverse is true: it is proprietary software that does not scale, but in a slightly different sense.

This was brought home to me by IBM's fashionable Blue Cloud announcement:

Blue Cloud – based on IBM’s Almaden Research Center cloud infrastructure -- will include Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling. Blue Cloud is supported by IBM Tivoli software that manages servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand. This includes software that is capable of instantly provisioning resources across multiple servers to provide users with a seamless experience that speeds performance and ensures reliability even under the most demanding situations. Tivoli monitoring checks the health of the provisioned servers and makes sure they meet service level agreements.

The whole point about cloud computing is that it has to be effectively infinite - the more people want, the more they get. You can't do that with software that requires some kind of licensing payment, unless it's flat-fee. You either have to write the software yourself, or - much easier - you use free software (or, as with Google and now IBM, you do both.)

If cloud computing takes off, Microsoft is going to be faced with a difficult choice: see everyone migrate to open source, or offer its operating systems for a flat fee. Given its recent behaviour in places like China and Russia, where it has effectively given away its software just to stop open source, I think it will opt for the latter.

Red Hat Enters Cloud Cuckoo Land

There has been a lot of interesting blogospheric comment on Red Hat's latest move:

Cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a web-scale virtual computing environment powered by Amazon Web Services. It provides everything needed to develop and host applications: compute capacity, bandwidth, storage, and the leading open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Cloud computing changes the economics of IT by enabling you to pay only for the capacity that you actually use. Compute capacity can be scaled up or down on demand to accommodate changing workloads and business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for cloud computing makes it easy to develop, deploy, and manage your new and existing applications in a virtual computing environment.

One point, though, seems not to have been picked up. And that is that open source has unique advantages in the cloud, er, space. Since open source applications are freely available, there is no barrier to expanding your use of the cloud at no extra cost (though I do wonder how support contracts are going to work there). Moreover, anyone can provide cloud computing versions of open source apps running on GNU/Linux, including dedicated services concentrating on specific sectors - leading to a highly efficient market.

I suspect that for the mainstream proprietary apps, the only people who will be able to offer them will be their respective software houses (given the complexities of licensing on in-house servers, imagine how messy it's likely to get with virtual systems potentially varying by the hour). Not much of a market there, methinks.

In Cloud Cuckoo Land

John Markoff's hard disc died; he tried doing without it:

What I discovered was that - with the caveat of a necessary network connection - life is just fine without a disk. Between the Firefox Web browser, Google’s Gmail and and the search engine company’s Docs Web-based word processor, it was possible to carry on quite nicely without local data

Interestingly, I had not one but three of my computers die within the space of a few weeks. Like Markoff, I am obsessive about backing up data, so I didn't lose anything important - other than the ability to access local files.

So I'm now largely living La Vida Online: Firefox as my computing environment, accessing Gmail, Writely (as I still prefer to call it), plus a few other online sites for storing various kinds of files and links. It works pretty well, and even when I get some new systems up and running, I'm aiming at prolonging my stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

In Your Face

Has everyone gone Facebook mad? It certainly seems so, and apparently I'm not the only one to think so. But whatever your views of Facebook now, it looks increasingly likely that it's going to be very big.

As I mentioned recently, the first sign that it had aspirations to being more than just another social network was when it opened up its platform. Now, it has underlined the platform aspect by purchasing Parakey.

Who? you might well say. Well, this might give you a hint of why it's an interesting move:

Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

Interested? You should be.

In explaining Parakey, Ross cuts to the chase. “We all know ­people…who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers,” he says. “We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online.”

"Live their lives online": well, that explains why Facebook bought the outfit. Among other things, Parakey will let Facebook users twiddle endlessly with their profiles even when they're offline.

Oh, and that "Ross" is Blake Ross, one of the moving forces behind Firefox. Parakey is based on Firefox technology, and will be (partly) open source. Assuming that Facebook keeps those parts open source (and it's hard to see how it could avoid doing so without rewriting the code from scratch), that means that Facebook could well become something of an ally for free software.

Well, I suppose that's a good reason to join the Facebook stampede.