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And it threatens to be controlled by open-source savvy, data-rich companies like Google.
Tim O'Reilly
(Credit: O'Reilly Media)On Wednesday in San Francisco, O'Reilly closed the first day of the Open Source Business Conference by shaking up some comfortable assumptions of the open-source commercial ecosystem, which has tended to focus on commoditizing established markets with low-cost, high-value distribution, all driven by open-source licensing.
This is nice, according to O'Reilly, but a pale shade of the real value that open source provides. It also conveniently forgets the real operating system of the future, which is the "whole Web," according to O'Reilly, and not Linux.
Linux, of course, has been essential to the economics and technological underpinnings of the Web. But it's a means, not the end. Indeed, while open source has been critical to the creation of cloud computing it may, as O'Reilly warned, "change the world in some ways that are inimical to the ideals that gave birth to open source."
The basic idea is that open-source software is being used to create the on-ramp to data lock-in on the Web, in the cloud.
But it's not just open source that is fueling the data gold rush. O'Reilly sees the cloud future filled with intelligent sensors (Fitbit, iPhone, etc.) that feed data to the cloud, where it is processed and accessed via the Web, generally using open-source software. Over time, these online services will connect and collaborate in the cloud, making the data even stickier.
In other words, more lock-in, as O'Reilly declared: "The lock-in of today is through massive databases that are so hard to re-create because they get better the more people use them."
READ MORE: Cnet.com
