The Open Road

In the cloud, no one cares about your software license. That is one of the most liberating--and frustrating--things about cloud computing.

Depending on your perspective, it either opens up computing or closes it off. Customers don't seem to care one way or another, happily shoveling data into cloud services like Google, Facebook, and others without (yet) wondering what will happen when they want to leave.

Cloud computing may just be the Hotel California of technology.

Google Trader

(Credit: Google)

I say this because even for companies, like Google, that articulate open-data policies, the cloud is still largely a one-way road into Web services, with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services. Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that. Social networks aren't very social with one other, as recently noted on the Autonomo.us mailing list.

For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern. For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had.

The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source.

In this cloud computing/Web 2.0 world, infrastructure needs to be cheap, flexible, and plentiful. Open source delivers all three.

Hence, we've seen companies like MySpace tripping all over themselves to open up parts of their platforms in order to make themselves more appealing to developers. As ReadWriteWeb wrote of Facebook back in 2007, however, such developer outreach has not opened up these Web platforms in the sense of providing useful off-ramps to services like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc. It has simply created more on-ramps.

Cue the nefarious Microsoft theme song.

Rather than wringing our hands over this, I think there's an opportunity to create amazing amounts of good (and wealth) in this open/closed Web. Frankly, the longer we're in this, the less it's going to matter whether the code is open or closed because, as Tim O'Reilly has been saying for years, data is the heart of the Web, and even open data isn't going to hurt a successful vendor's network effects.

Take Google Trader, an interesting new SMS application that helps people buy and sell goods through text messaging. As The Economist notes, however, one of Google Trader's most interesting applications is in helping to foster free markets in emerging economies:

Lastly there is Google Trader, a text-based system that matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities. Sellers send a message to say where they are and what they have to offer, which will be available to potential buyers within 30km for seven days. Mr Makawa says his father used the service to look for a buyer for some pigs, which he sold to pay school fees. These services cost 110 shillings ($0.05) a time, the same as a standard text message, except for Google Trader, which costs double that. In their first five weeks the services received a total of more than 1m queries.

I'm not familiar with the economics of SMS, but I'm guessing that Google gets a cut of the messages its application generates. The more useful Google Trader becomes, the more SMS it generates, the more commissions Google collects.

For the entrepreneurs using Google's service, they could possibly care less whether Google Trader is open source, but Google might. Open the source (and the API to the service), and let a thousand add-on development projects bloom. The more useful and feature-rich the Trader application, the more SMS, the more...you get the picture.

Take me to Google, Earthling.

The key is to create an open Web platform, one into which a diverse array of mobile software services can tie. This is one reason Google is such an advocate for open source. Android and other projects bring more people to the Web, a Web that Google monetizes through proprietary services like AdWords.

The community is critical to building upon the platform, but the money is in control of the platform and provisioning of services therefrom.

Just ask Amazon.com. According to ZDNet, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service makes roughly $220 million per year. That's a lot of cash, and is a function of EC2 sitting at the heart of a growing developer community, one that builds upon Amazon's open APIs to the service.

Some companies like Cloudera and Red Hat will make piles of cash providing the infrastructure for this cloud-computing gold rush. But the biggest money of all will be those that can build platforms in the cloud, platforms that depend upon open source but which aren't open in the traditional open-source license sense of the word.

That traditional licensing world is dead. Open-source licensing has become an on-ramp to closed data services, hardly what its creators envisaged. In fact, proprietary cloud vendors are almost certainly going to become the biggest cheerleaders for open source, because it means more developers creating more on-ramps to the cloud.

Even if such providers create effective exits, it's unlikely that consumers and businesses will actively use them...

...just like in the Software 1.0 world.

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Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady writes a bleak, but likely accurate, eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing. In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses," in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging "Goliath" are slim.

Peter Paul Rubens: David beats Goliath

It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business.

Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is "a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today." He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds.

This 'David' alternative to the 'Goliath' big vendors doesn't beat them, but instead helps to keep Goliath honest. Really, when you think about it for more than a few seconds, that's what open source has done for traditional computing, too.

Look around. The big vendors controlling IT and the Web are...the same vendors that controlled it yesterday, and are likely the same vendors that will control it 10 years from now. Sure, they'll swap places for a few years, but does anyone really believe that IBM and Microsoft won't still be cat-fighting a decade from now?

But now consider what open source has been doing, mostly behind the scenes. Open source is changing the way these big vendors operate, because it's altering customer expectations.

Open source has permeated Microsoft to the point that it is now considering throwing its weight behind the Spring Framework and other open-source projects.

Google, for its part, went from a happy consumer of open source to an active contributor to open source on a very big scale. Not because Google is "not evil," but because it realizes that open source can give it a competitive advantage in the market.

We'll see more of this as open source challenges otherwise proprietary vendors to compete through openness. We're already seeing some of this as vendors like Red Hat seek to claim parts of the cloud for open source.

In so doing, open source will continue to challenge and change the buying conversation, resetting expectations to transparency, something we desperately need: if the allegation that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pressuring governments to buy Microsoft technologies is even remotely true, the best antidote may be open-source procurement policies.

In sum, don't expect open source to "win" in the cloud; at least, not in the form of an open-source vendor doing the winning. Rather, look to open source to influence, to shape the cloud.

Just like it has to traditional, proprietary software.

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For all the hype around cloud computing, two big issues continue to keep CIOs from feeling safe participating: security and interoperability. Red Hat, by announcing its Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program and Amazon's entry in that program, hopes to allay these concerns and claim for itself a significant percentage of the money set to pour into the cloud-computing gold rush.

For the past five years, CIOs have given Red Hat top ranking for value. A significant part of this value, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst revealed on Red Hat's first-quarter earnings call, is the company's ability to corral a complex array of third-party software vendor certifications and package them into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, giving the CIO peace of mind that whatever the application, it will "just work" on RHEL.

Now Red Hat wants to bring that peace of mind to the cloud, effectively giving CIOs a way to follow the Red Hat brand well beyond the four walls of their data center into public cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services, and then back to their own private clouds, if they so choose.

With over 3,500 applications certified to work with RHEL, and likely thousands of others that haven't sought formal certification, Red Hat is offering CIOs a safe way to extend their computing to the cloud. Intriguingly, it's likely that only Microsoft can make similarly potent claims, given its own application ecosystem and core infrastructure that can be used to power cloud computing.

Red Hat and Microsoft, duking it out to be the center of the cloud.

The two companies bring a very different mindset to cloud computing, not the least reason being that Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, also competes with the very cloud providers it hopes to enable. Red Hat is not competing with its partners.

Red Hat's strategy is founded in choice, as I discovered in a call with Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of Corporate Development, who has been heading up Red Hat's cloud-computing efforts.

Mike Evans, VP of corporate development, Red Hat

Q. Red Hat isn't one to try to hang out with "the cool kids," just because they're cool. Why is Red Hat getting into cloud computing now? What do you hope to accomplish?
Evans: Some may not remember, but Red Hat has actually been involved with cloud computing since at least 2007, when we announced we were offering RHEL in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service. During that time we were fine-tuning our cloud offering, not only technologically but also from a support and business model perspective. Cloud computing is a fundamental shift in how software gets delivered, and it took roughly 18 months of largely beta testing to get to a point where we felt we had an offering that could live up to Red Hat's reputation for quality and service.

During that beta period, we spent a lot of time talking with CIOs, trying to understand their concerns with cloud computing and how Red Hat could overcome them. CIOs have two primary concerns with cloud computing--security and interoperability--but also worry around SLAs [service-level agreements], compliance, and more. The area where Red Hat felt like it could have the biggest immediate impact is on interoperability.

There are three levels of interoperability: data formats, management and measurement, and applications.

Data-format interoperability is the lowest level, and basically means, "Once I'm running my application with Cloud Provider X, can I get my data out and move my application to Cloud Provider Y?" This turns out to be non-trivial to overcome if different cloud providers run on different "substrates," or infrastructure components like operating system, application servers, etc.

Then there is the management and measurement piece. Once IT starts working with a given set of tools like Hyperic for managing its cloud assets on, for example, its Rightscale cloud, will it be able to continue using these same tools if it moves to a private cloud or Amazon cloud? A CIO needs to know that its tools investment will follow it from cloud to cloud. Again, this is difficult when switching between disparate cloud "substrates."

Finally, interoperability is a question of application portability. How can a CIO be sure that an application written for a Google cloud will work with Salesforce, Amazon, or another cloud?

At the macro level, Red Hat and open source can break down these interoperability barriers. We can't hide behind proprietary APIs. It's in our DNA to be interoperable.

It's also in cloud computing's DNA. Today, virtually every cloud-computing service, with the exception of Microsoft's, is built using open-source software. This works to Red Hat's advantage, because the world is already building cloud computing on Linux, for example.

For its part, Microsoft, too, will need to eventually capitulate to open source because it simply won't be able to keep up. Imagine having to rewrite all of the great open-source cloud software like Hadoop. How can Microsoft do that and remain competitive?

Why Red Hat? What role does your certification program play in all this?
Evans: Red Hat is firmly positioned to take on CIOs' core concerns with security and interoperability. With JBoss, RHEL, and our virtualization offerings, Red Hat already provides the trusted low-level infrastructure, or "substrate" as I've called it, upon which many CIOs depend. Given that we believe most cloud-computing involvement, at least initially, will be in private clouds, it's important that CIOs feel they can trust their cloud infrastructure. Red Hat delivers that trust.

We want, however, for CIOs to feel that they can move to public clouds like Amazon Web Services with confidence, so this certification program offers cloud-computing vendors a way to tell reluctant CIOs, "This cloud is safe for you." Our business model is founded in choice, as CIOs know. We're looking to make clouds safe, not a new way to lock them in. This new certification program is a significant step toward making cloud computing a reality for many CIOs that would otherwise be too nervous.

We're also offering a great way to bring confidence to ISVs that don't want to have to rewrite their applications for all the different cloud-computing providers. One aim of this certification program is to provide a certified, common substrate to which ISVs can write their applications. Many ISVs will find that the work they've already done to certify to RHEL will work just fine with RHEL in the cloud. JBoss, for example, worked "out of the box" when we ran it in the cloud for the first time.

Finally, CIOs are concerned about getting support and security updates for their applications and workloads, whether running on private clouds or public clouds. CIOs aren't dumping their private computing infrastructure in a mad rush to public clouds. They want good ways to leverage both. This Red Hat program certifies select cloud providers that have a strong support, technical, and business partnership with Red Hat, giving CIOs confidence to move into the public cloud.

In these ways, Red Hat is taking the complexity and risk out of cloud computing for end customers, ISVs, and cloud providers. We spent 18 months making the cloud work for Red Hat, and now want to make those efforts available to others through this certification program.

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Imagine you wanted to create the Kindle killer, a revolutionary e-book device that matched and improved upon its functionality. What would you do? Well, you could, Mission Impossible-style, break into Amazon's Seattle headquarters and carry off the source code for the Kindle, then copy and extend its functionality to create a competitive device.

Or you could simply download the Kindle's source code from Amazon.com, where Amazon has already released the source code to the Kindle.

In fact, as TechCrunch rightly notes, the Kindle source code has been available since 2007.

Given this fact, why haven't you been doing anything with it? Why hasn't Apple taken the code and built the Kindle's winning technology into the iPhone? Why did Sony bother developing its own e-book reader?

Well, not only is the code in question not directly related to the actual Kindle application experience, as Rod Begbie notes, but instead "just the GPL libraries used to power the Kindle software," but it's also somewhat beside the point.

Apple doesn't use the Kindle code because any e-book it releases will be based on its own design, operating system, etc. Same for Sony and, presumably, for you.

While source code can be useful for learning how to solve complex problems, the actual approach and deployment a developer chooses often precludes her from using someone else's source code, and particularly a big body of code like that used in the Kindle. It could prove to be more work tailoring Amazon's work than simply starting from scratch.

So, bravo to Amazon for living up to its commitments under the GPL and releasing some of the Kindle source code, but don't expect to release a Kindle-killer based on Amazon's code. Amazon has brand, hardware OEM relationships, and other strengths that make its Kindle source code valuable, attributes that you and I almost certainly lack.

Such things are arguably better barriers to competition than patents and copyright.

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Slate's Paul Collins on Friday took Amazon.com to task for not being more generous in its charitable giving. "While Amazon.com is famously cheap in its prices, it's also become infamously cheap to the community it lives in," writes Collins. The criticism,while clever, misses the mark, much as deprecations of corporations for not contributing more open-source code largely miss the mark.

Why? Because a company should not be measured by its charity, but rather by how well it delivers returns to shareholders. A company is set up to generate profits, not alms.

This distinction is critical, and it's one that I haven't always followed in my own estimations of corporate open-source contributions. Take, for example, my criticism of Google and Yahoo for not contributing more to open source.

As it turns out, Google and Yahoo have started to aggressively contribute to a wide array of open-source communities, but not out of charity. Google loves open source because open source helps to speed its own development, but also because open source helps to get more people online (and, hence, clicking Google-served advertisements) faster and at lower cost. Supporting open source is therefore a rational, calculated act for Google.

But not all open source. You won't see Google contributing to OpenX, the open-source ad server, any time soon. OpenX competes with Google, after all, and Google is not in any way required to contribute to its own demise.

Or take IBM. IBM is the classic example of a company that does well for itself by doing well for open source. IBM doesn't contribute to Apache, Linux, and other open-source projects because it's a corporate incarnation of Santa Claus. It actively contributes to open source because open source actively contributes to IBM.

In like manner, if we want Microsoft to join the open-source community more fully, the best strategy will be to appeal to its self-interest, not guilt. Microsoft's self-interest demands that it compete with Linux, but it may equally suggest that it contribute actively to Lucene for open-source search, OpenX for open-source ad-serving, or any number of other projects that may hurt competitors and, therefore, help Microsoft.

Corporations like Amazon have long contributed to charities to burnish their images in their communities, for preferential tax treatment, and for other benefits. Open-source contributions are equally self-interested, but arguably open-source contributions serve much wider communities, and to greater effect, even despite their self-interested motives.

Our job, therefore, is not to castigate corporations into contributing to open-source projects, just as Slate's attack on Amazon does little for charity, but rather to demonstrate the value in "selfish" open-source giving.

In other words, we should focus on correlating contributions to corporate benefits. As companies--vendors and customers alike--come to perceive the benefits they can derive from open-source contributions, we should see a flowering of such contributions.

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Last week, Tim O'Reilly called for Amazon.com to open up its Kindle e-reader, or "Amazon will wind up another online pioneer who ends up a belated guest at the party it planned to host."

On Wednesday, Amazon demonstrated that it understands the value of openness, even if it's not yet prepared to embrace open standards for the Kindle, by providing an iPhone application that enables users to read their Kindle content on Apple's iPhone, as CNET reports.

This is a shrewd move. It's unlikely that many will want to trade the Kindle reading experience for the iPhone's, but it should prove a useful complement that drives more Amazon revenue.

As Mozilla's John Lilly opines, the iPhone Kindle application is "useful, if I'm somewhere and forgot my Kindle...and I'm sure that I'll buy books with it to read a snippet, then really read on my Kindle."

In sum, by providing a Kindle for iPhone application, Amazon has opened up a compelling complement to its Kindle device, one that will likely feed more revenue to Amazon while simultaneously crippling rivals' efforts to build a critical mass of iPhone e-book readers.

Genius.

I woke up this morning to a special deal from Amazon.com on a TomTom GPS device. While its one-day, 33 percent discount almost certainly has nothing to do with Microsoft's announcement that it is suing TomTom for eight counts of patent infringement, the appearance of Amazon trying to clear its inventory of the TomTom One-S couldn't have better comic timing:

I don't want to prey upon TomTom's misfortunes, however. I'm going to be waiting for the "75 percent off" sale next week. :-)

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O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly makes a provocative claim relative to Amazon's successful e-book reader, the Kindle: embrace open e-book standards, or be run over by them.

It's a bold prediction, considering what Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone. It may also be wrong.

Indeed, though I'd like O'Reilly to be right on this, I think that the iPhone, which he uses to prove his point, actually demonstrates against it. O'Reilly writes:

(Apple) seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to discover. While Apple maintains tight control over what goes into the App Store, there's a loophole big enough to drive a truck through: Any Web page can act as an application for the iPhone.

O'Reilly then explains that the Kindle doesn't provide this same loophole (i.e., allowing open-formatted e-books to be read on the Kindle in the same way that the iPhone enables Web applications to run on the iPhone, and in which the iPod encouraged MP3s and other free formats to flourish on the iPod).

I don't think I agree. On my Kindle, I read a variety of books that I downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, and I suspect that this will only increase as more and more free content is formatted for the Kindle.

O'Reilly's argument is much stronger when denouncing Amazon's "you must buy it from us" mentality, because it by definition limits the size of the market. Some, like Apple, may be able to execute against such a vision, but the odds of getting the world to beat a path to one's door--in the way that Microsoft did for Office and Apple did for the iPod--is difficult, indeed.

O'Reilly is right that Amazon has better odds in going with open standards. Just look at how well Sony has fared in e-books. But that's the risk Amazon is running, and it's one that has the potential to pay off big-time, if the company does it well. I believe that open standards are the right way to go, but Amazon may feel that its up-front investment in creating a device worthy of the e-book market justifies a winner-take-all strategy.

O'Reilly is right to argue this:

Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins. Amazon needs to get with the program. Or, like AOL and MSN, Amazon will wind up another online pioneer who ends up a belated guest at the party it planned to host.

But it's easy to see why Amazon might disagree and why maybe, just maybe, it may succeed to the industry's detriment. Open standards do tend to win over a market. What they don't do is guarantee a winner, which is likely why Amazon is content to play its hand rather than the open-standards hand that has yet to win over the market, just as it failed to win the emerging digital-music market.

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I admit that I nearly got caught up in my former colleague James Urquhart's excellent analysis of Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10 release, code-named Karmic Koala. I saw the word "open" laced heavily through the post, and given Canonical's commitment to fully open-source Ubuntu experience, I played along.

Ubuntu in the clouds

(Credit: Ubuntu)

But something doesn't quite fit in Canonical's story.

It's called Amazon.com. Yes, Ubuntu 9.10 will give users an option to build its own Elastic Compute Cloud-style service, using open-source Eucalyptus (or another cloud provider), but the intent certainly seems to seamlessly plug users into Amazon's closed cloud:

Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the APIs of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to set up their own cloud using entirely open tools...During the Karmic cycle, we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image...Wouldn't it be apt for Ubuntu to make the Amazon jungle as easy to navigate as, say, APT?

Or is Ubuntu simply making it easier to navigate one's way into the Amazon jungle but not to get out of that jungle?

This isn't meant as a criticism. After all, I've increasingly seen that the best way to monetize open-source software is with the careful inclusion of proprietary software. I told The New York Times' Ashlee Vance that Mark Shuttleworth would eventually have to grapple with this same strategy, basing it on my own conversations with Shuttleworth about how to effectively monetize Ubuntu.

That strategy increasingly points to tethering an open server (and desktop) with closed cloud services. That's not a critique. It's a fact.

Unfortunately, it's also a fact that once Ubuntu hands off its customers to a closed cloud, it depends on that cloud vendor to offer open data policies. The delivery of such policies is out of its hands. It won't have much say in the matter.

It's ironic, in many ways, that the key to Canonical monetizing Ubuntu will be proprietary software. There's a very good reason that Canonical isn't leading with a link into open-source software like Eucalyptus: just as Red Hat depended on proprietary Oracle to drive its early business, Canonical's best chance of driving open-source revenue from Ubuntu is likely to be closed-source Amazon.

Amazon's service is popular. It's also proprietary. Depending on an open but weak cloud service would be futile; building bridges to proprietary Amazon will likely not.

Canonical, just as Google has done in search, is helping its users build habits. I am sure that there will be positive financial remuneration to Canonical, the more that Ubuntu users indulge their Amazon EC2 habit--a habit that Canonical therefore will have an interest in feeding.

Is this bad? No, it's business. Even Canonical needs to make money, and it's really, really hard to make a lot of money by giving everything away.

Some things need to be closed. In this case, it's the cloud that Ubuntu will feed.

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