Recently, Nick Carr wrote an article in response to a blog post authored by a Google
employee about Openness. He argues
that
Precisely so. We can (and will) have debates about the relative
openness of Azure and AWS and Force.com and all the other "cloud platforms" that
are available or will be available. And those will be important debates. But in
this early stage of the cloud's development, openness means little to the buyer
(or user). The buyers, particularly those in big companies, are nervous about
the cloud even as they are becoming increasingly eager to reap the benefits the
cloud can provide. What they care about right now is security, reliability,
features, compatibility with their existing systems and applications, ease of
adoption, stability of the vendor, and other practical concerns. In the long
run, they may come to regret their lack of stress on openness, but in the
here-and-now it's just not a major consideration. They want stuff that works and
won't blow up in their faces.
Well, I disagree with his argument for
the following reasons
- Openness and "better" need not be inversely related. The presence of one
need not imply NOT the other. This sounds like the kind of arguments made by
people in Microsoft and other companies to cover their proprietary base. In the
case of desktop world, there were some opensource software that were not
matching the bells and whistles of Microsoft products and, in a rare few cases,
the usability was genuinely bad. However, we have seen in the traditional
software world itself that openness and better can go hand in hand. There are
thousands of examples for it but I will just quote the case of Apache and rest
my case.
- In the traditional software world, some of the opensource software may not
be "better" in terms of the usability but the reason for existence of such "not
better" software is partially due to the inherent volunteer nature of the software
developers and absence of any big company behind them. In fact, most of the
volunteer driven software were better but, in some rare instances, there were
not enough volunteers in a project team to make the software "better". Now
times have changed. Even in the traditional software world, we find companies
behind many opensource projects. In the Cloud Computing world, we can definitely
find a company behind most of the projects that carry the term "open" with them. Unlike traditional software world, Cloud Computing world requires huge investments in terms of resources and, hence, we always see one or more companies playing a role behind the open label.
Whether it is opensource or open standards based Cloud Computing projects, we always find a company backing up the project. It is not purely volunteer driven
any more. The openness is not just associated with the urge to scratch the itch
of the developers but it is also directly linked to the very survival of the
company behind the open initiative. This will ensure that being open is also
better and these two terms need not be inverse to one another.
- In the case of Cloud Computing, it is just not the case of hardware and
software without lock-ins but it is also about storing our data and our IP
(Intellectual Property) on someone else's datacenter(s). We give up control of
our data to a third party. If we don't worry about openness now and demand that
we can retrieve our data and our IPs in one of the open formats using open
protocols, there is a theoretical chance that the Cloud Vendor can keep our
business hostage and use this advantage to determine the price. It is not like
the case of traditional software times where we had our data and our IP in our
premises and we could wait till later to worry about the proprietary lock-in.
We, at least, had a chance to get out of the vendor lock-in if we could manage
to put enough resources into locked-in data of those times. If the data and IP is locked in at third party
locations, there is nothing we can do except to play by the rules of the vendor,
even if it borders close to being illegal. We should not repeat the same mistake of
the past and do it right from the beginning itself.
If anyone ever thinks that openness is not important, they can avoid
worrying about whether a particular core software or app in the cloud is opensource or not
(Anyhow, I will soon be writing a post on why opensource is very important in
the SaaS world). However, they should definitely worry about open standards and
open formats for data retrieval. I admire Mr. Carr for his role in making Cloud
Computing popular but he has got this one wrong. We should worry about openness
now than later.
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