Rialtas.net – Government 2.0

Just read a very interesting article by Tim O’Reilly on ‘Open Source and Cloud Computing’

O’Reilly highlights the dangers of proprietary  ‘lock in’ to cloud computing service providers such as Amazon’s S3 and EC2, Google’s AppEngine and Salesforce’s force.com.

O’Reilly asks

Why did the WWW end up with hundreds of millions of independent information providers while centralized sites like AOL and MSN faltered?…

…All of the platform as a service plays, from Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and Google’s AppEngine to Salesforce’s force.com — not to mention Facebook’s social networking platform — have a lot more in common with AOL than they do with internet services as we’ve known them over the past decade and a half. Will we have to spend a decade backtracking from centralized approaches? The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor’s private preserve…

…How can we preserve freedom to innovate when the competitive advantage of online players comes from massive databases created via user contribution, which literally get better the more people use them, raising seemingly insuperable barriers to new competition? …

…But just “paying attention” to cloud computing isn’t the point. The point is to rediscover what makes open source tick, but in the new context. It’s important to recognize that open source has several key dimensions that contribute to its success:

1. Licenses that permit and encourage redistribution, modification, and even forking;
2. An architecture that enables programs to be used as components where-ever possible, and extended rather than replaced to provide new functionality;
3. Low barriers for new users to try the software;
4. Low barriers for developers to build new applications and share them with the world….

…This is far from a complete list, but it gives food for thought. As outlined above, I don’t believe we’ve figured out what kinds of licenses will allow forking of Web 2.0 and cloud applications, especially because the lock-in provided by many of these applications is given by their data rather than their code. However, there are hopeful signs like Yahoo! Boss that companies are at beginning to understand that in the era of the cloud, open source without open data is only half the application….

Read the full article here.