The End Of Software - Anibal's Blog

Nowadays, the current huge success of Open Source is beyond a short-term trend. Big old players like IBM or Oracle are fully committed, even Microsoft has a strategy (whatever it means). Also, we have the winners, the newcomers, riding on exponential growth rates, like Red Hat, Alfresco, Pentaho, OpenX, MySQL (now Sun), JBoss (now Red Hat), SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Volantis, or Openbravo. The Open Source business is mature, and the life cycle from community projects until corporate distribution channels is complete. To detail a report, Gartner stated 85% of enterprises using Open Source, and the remaining 15% are eyening to incorporate something in the next 12 months. Thinking about Web 2.0, the question is how the Open Source ecosystem is going to evolve.

Now, the Web 2.0 is all about services provided on-line..... may be with Open Source software. Of course, it make sense to apply Open Source, to be able to scale without any license cost, only restricted by the hardware.

In this way, we can understand the gargantuan size of Google data centers, designing its own servers, replicating by thousands, and managing all the business with Open Source software.

So..... should all the software, used to provided these services, be Open Source ? An "ASP loophole" in the Open Source licenses.

My answer is No. Because these kind of software is only useful for author, to provide the service. It may be created or customized from an Open Source version, but it can't be applied for the benefit of the general public.

If Google give me all their software, it's going to be difficult to replicate the same business (just give me time :-) ).

In this way of thinking, GPLv3 avoided to introduce any ASP restriction, applying limitations only on the software distributed as binaries.

As Web 2.0 is all about service, it really does not matter what software is used. Or if it's changed from one version to another. We only want the pure service.

For the provider, it must be an optional, to be applied only if it fits to the business. Eg Community Version, Enterprise Version and Live Version.

For further reading:  AGPL: Open Source Licensing in a Networked Age,

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