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Born free (Economist)
The Economist looks
at the growth of free software during the recession. "For years, this software commons was no more than an obscure sideshow. But then the internet provided volunteer programmers with a way to co-operate cheaply. IBM and Oracle, two industry giants, threw their weight behind the Linux operating system, in part to weaken their rival Microsoft. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, many firms turned to Linux and other open-source software to save money."
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Born free (Economist) Posted May 29, 2009 18:20 UTC (Fri) by thornhill (guest, #57198) [Link]
It is the usual substanceless writing that fills their magazine.
This might be bearable while the economy is booming, but it's a farce today. Someone should write an anti-buzzword-plugin for firefox that automatically blocks pages that contain the words "cloud computing".
Informative and tempered Posted May 29, 2009 18:57 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] On the contrary, I found it most informative and well informed, only perhaps not with the kind of data that you grok. It mentions for example that Red Hat grew 18% year-on-year for Q1, or that most companies around the world are interested in adoption. They even speak about freedom and the advantages it entails, not only about reducing costs.Even the mandatory mention of cloud computing is unusually tempered: Most of the firms peddling this model, such as Amazon and Google [...]Not much new in the article, it is true, but a good read for business people anyway.
Born free (Economist) Posted Jun 5, 2009 2:12 UTC (Fri) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]
"It is the usual substanceless writing that fills their magazine.
This might be bearable while the economy is booming, but it's a farce today."
Can you explain why substanceless writing is more bearable depending on the economy?
Actually, I found the article to be a pretty good overview of technology trends -- Not everyone keeps up on this stuff, you know. You might blast it because it's not technically deep, but hey, it's not for tech geeks like us. I think it captured the salient points and dilemmas pretty well.
"Someone should write an anti-buzzword-plugin for firefox that
While I admit "Cloud Computing" is overused, sometimes it does represent a real 'paradigm shift' going on. For example, Amazon EC2: By getting rid of all the hardware muck, you can focus on the "next level" of problems: How do I use software to paper over a server failure? How do I make sure I can quickly rebuild a failed server? If I had an API to add and remove servers, how could I leverage that to reduce my bill / survive a slashdotting?
From the article:
Born free (Economist) Posted May 30, 2009 11:32 UTC (Sat) by aryonoco (subscriber, #55563) [Link]
The inability of the tech-savvy crowd to distinguish between a buzzword and a paradigm is most apparent in comments like these.
We said the same thing about AJAX: after all, it is nothing other than XMLHttpRequiest + Javascript + CSS, and has been available for a number of years? Right? Well, look around you and how much the web has changed since AJAX gained traction. Look at how much more Web applications have become viable, and how many organisations are moving their intranet applications purely to the Web.
We said the same thing about iPod, after all, an MP3 player was nothing new, and there were other MP3 players on the market with more features and disk space. Right?
Cloud computing is the next paradigm that the OSS community for some reason dismisses for just being a buzzword. After all, it is just virtualisation and renting computer space, Right?
The way I view it, a decade from now, Amazon AWS, specially EC2 will be looked upon much like Netscape. Netscape wasn't the first web browser either, but it made it viable for the masses for the first time. While EC2 is nothing new (we have had Xen for how many years now?) the opportunities it provides are quite staggering. For many small-to-medium sized businesses, there is no longer any need to buy their own dedicated servers, just to service commodity needs like a file server or a mail server.
Economist, as always, does a fantastic job covering everything. Their pieces are informative and insightful to the extreme. No paper provides a more comprehensive coverage of world affairs in a weekly format. And guess what? Even in this economy, the Economist's subscribers have doubled in the last 3 years. It is picking readers left and right from Time and Newsweek, and showing once and for all, that people are willing to pay for quality journalism.
Born free (Economist) Posted May 30, 2009 23:56 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
We tend to be easily fascinated by the hero who "first" invented something and then easily get bored and dismiss all the similar, later inventions, even when the first version is crap and the later brilliant. This seems unfair; the later inventions typically owe little to the first draft. It is rather all simultaneous inventions that equally owe everything to their era: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants",
Born free (Economist) Posted May 31, 2009 20:32 UTC (Sun) by pixelpapst (guest, #55301) [Link] When did we (the free software crowd) become so damn conservative ? I've grown pretty comfortable with my X-based modern desktop, my regular distri-provided software upgrades (a steady stream of security improvements and new features), relatively high-quality frameworks to code for, and occasionally compiling smallpieces of the infrastructure myself for hacking on it. (I also build packages myself, but that's beside my point.) Maybe I just don't feel the pain so much anymore like I used to. Maybe for somebody who regularly has to shred their whole windows partition, GMail, Google Docs, Twitter etc. and now EC2 make so much more sense, because for one thing these techs ease the pain of software deployment for Average Joe. I hope we do not miss out on the Wave train, or we might wake up some morning realizing we are stuck in some insignificant corner of the net.
Born free (Economist) Posted Jun 1, 2009 19:25 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
I'd be somewhat surprised if KOffice didn't jump on the Wave train. Of course, Wave (proper) is server-to-server, and there isn't a default open-source (or otherwise) XMPP server that everybody uses. But I bet someone will write up the obvious client-to-server version of Wave and KOffice will support it (with a certain amount of exciting refactoring -- edits are coming in to the open document for a source other than the UI).
But the obvious end result of Wave being specified as a public protocol (as opposed to being Google-internal, for Google servers talking to each other) is that you should be able to drag-and-drop an office document on a Kopete conversation and then you're collaboratively editing the document hosted on your XMPP server. I don't anticipate there being any Wave servers other than Google Docs deployed before this happens.
Born free (Economist) Posted Jun 1, 2009 14:38 UTC (Mon) by rgoates (guest, #3280) [Link]
Perhaps we should view Google's "cloud computing" offering as a way to export the cheap electricity of the Bonneville Power Administration to the rest of the world. Like the way cattle ranchers view themselves as selling grass to consumers, with cattle being the packaging. I don't know where Amazon's compute facilities are located but I suspect they also use cheap Pacific Northwest electricity.
Born free (Economist) Posted May 30, 2009 15:03 UTC (Sat) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
> “Most firms don’t really care that it is libre, as in freedom, but that
it is gratis, as in beer.”
From the article.
>a flowering of different business models. A popular approach is to sell
That in other contexts, is called a loss-leader.
There is some comfort however. When people try to 'monetize' free software
Derek
Born free (Economist) Posted Jun 1, 2009 16:27 UTC (Mon) by ndye (subscriber, #9947) [Link]
When Finance / Legal forces Corporate IT to use the inferior, monetized OpenSource, it's ... somewhere between uncomfortable, painful, and torturous.
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