Open source may be your only ticket out of the cloud

Enterprise IT sometimes behaves like the group of teenagers I counsel on a weekly basis as part of my church responsibilities: "Damn the future, let's live for the present!"

Stephen O'Grady offers a pungent critique of this nearsighted tendency in enterprise IT, especially as it pertains to the cloud:

Very much like Apple on the consumer level, (commercial cloud providers) Google et al demand sacrifices in return for convenience. Perhaps--or make that likely--realizing that businesses will invariably sacrifice the future at the altar of the present. We'll give you the convenience and time to market now; just don't expect to leave later.

And it's hard to blame (enterprise IT) for that, honestly. They've got jobs to do and kids to feed, and their blind trust in the technology industry to police itself and not lock them in this time as they've been locked in so many times before is as Peanuts touching as it is naive. Whether Lucy will yank the football out from under them yet again depends, as far as I can tell, on open source.

Why open source? Because open source helps to keep vendors like Google and Amazon honest by offering open alternatives to closed clouds (e.g., Eucalyptus).

Also, it's very possible that cloud computing will be nudged open in important ways due to the furor raised over proprietary practices.

This isn't simply a matter of open-source advocates castigating companies for locking in customers. It's also a clever sales tactic that an increasing array of companies will use to win over customers leery of signing over their data to a proprietary cloud provider, seemingly once and for all.

As the cloud gains relevance, we'll see an increasing array of companies that deliver software as a service (SaaS), but provide an "eject" mechanism via open-source, on-premise offerings. SugarCRM does this now, and I think we'll begin to see this more and more often.

The reality is that the service will be compelling enough to keep customers from bolting. But offering the safety blanket is worthwhile, even if no one ever uses it (and, frankly, I doubt many will, because very few are capable or running their own cloud, and even fewer want to).

O'Grady concludes that "Whether open source takes a role front and center...remains to be seen, but is certain that it will--as it has to date--have a crucial role in shaping the cloud market to come." How significant that role is largely up to us.

Disclosure: I am an advisor to SugarCRM.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[botchagalupe]

The Tail Wagging The Dog!

I would argue that Amazon's dominance has forced the open source cloud solutions to follow their proprietary lead. Both Eucalyptus and OpenNebula have designed their cloud api off the Amazon proprietary WSDL. Sounds like to me, Amazon, for now, will control who and when someone gets to be front and center...

John
johnmwillis.com

[vikinzer]

I find it fascinating you are making this argument after some of the previous posts you've made about Google and how "the cloud" makes open source unimportant as long as you work in open standards. Of course many many people, myself included jumped in and disagreed with you stating that the exit options listed above were very important, and at their core were something open source provided in the older traditional environment, that was not provided in a closed cloud. Your formats can be as open as the great sky above the plains, and if you don't have another cloud to process your data it doesn't do you a lot of good.

In terms of your comment that few people have the money or will to run their own cloud I would point out that many people don't have the money or will to go in and tinker with the source code of their applications (especially items as monolithic as openoffice), but the availability is still important, because the existence of a few companies that do have the money and will keeps the providers honest, and they stay honest with everyone. It's the same phenomenon that makes Linux/OSS so awesome for Windows users. If it weren't for Firefox IE would still be at 6.0, and if it weren't for Linux on Netbooks Windows 7 would be just as bloated or more so than Vista. The need to compete with the Open Source offerings, and in the case of the cloud the companies who have the resources to utilize them improves the closed source competition. That competitive effect keeps the industry healthy, and is good for everyone.