Comments on: From Tolstoy to Tinker Bell

By: “Experience always comes before open [social].” | Lookery Blog

“Experience always comes before open [social].” | Lookery Blog — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 18:12:53 +0000

[...] JP Rangaswami comments over on his blog, advocating Open Source as the antidote to Cloud Monopolies: I have always had [...]

By: Brendan

Brendan — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:00:40 +0000

If there is an arrow stuck in your body, then what is most important? What material it is made of, or how do I get it out and cure my wounds?

Power relationships are part of the human condition. You can not change that. What matters is how you treat it.

By: alexis

alexis — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:08:17 +0000

It is about the economics of centrally capitalised ‘single source’ services versus peer to peer and ‘multi source’ federations of cooperating providers.

Free software and free services (qua Franklin Street Statement) undermine monopolies on distribution of software. But even if all software and services are 100% FSF+FSS compliant there is still room for Cloud Gorillas i.e. Amazons and Googles that can finance CPU and bandwidth at a better price than its competitors, thereby making the best profit when it rents out those assets.

Real alternatives to gorilla (or maybe even monopolist) cloud providers will require some sort of economic openness as well as free or open licensing. Federations of peers that can form ‘clouds’ in the same way that SETI-at-home does, but from any computing device. So that this does not depend on “coherent communal action”, federations will most likely be managed by a group of ‘super node’ providers. But unlike Google and Amazon, these super-nodes will operate as financial-exchange type utilities – their economics will be based on exchange of excess capacity between peers, and the creation of liquidity based on low barriers to participation.

Just to be clear – this is all science fiction as far as I am concerned ;-)

By: JP

JP — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:41:07 +0000

I think it has something to do with barriers to entry, so I have some sympathy with Gustav’s comment. When barriers to entry get lowered, then irrational people with imperfect information can collude to do market-correcting things. Such as opensource.

By: John Dodds

John Dodds — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:19:33 +0000

Isn’t a self-correcting market predicated upon false premises like rational behaviour and perfect information? The majority of people don’t think of Microsoft and Google as monopolies – just things they use which serve them adequately (in their mind) and give them more time to do other stuff that’s more important to them.

By: Benoît Tuerlinckx

Benoît Tuerlinckx — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:38:59 +0000

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
(baron Acton, 1887)
And the Web is the battlefield for 21st century power.

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:32:29 +0000

There’s a better explanation from Leonard Richardson. “I believe that programmable distributed services are also due to be swallowed by the web, that one day they will be regarded as just another kind of web site. ”

If you want to be optimistic about it, “the cloud” is just “the web” with potentially more complicated resources behind the URLs. All this trillion-dollar cloud of the future malarkey is missing the point: it’s already happening. What can you stick a REST interface on today and become part of “the cloud”? Or what interface of someone else’s can you use?

By: Gustav Bertram

Gustav Bertram — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:08:58 +0000

The reason why Microsoft, Google and Apple can exist is simple. Copyright provides a method for creating artificial monopolies.

It is not that the market is not self correcting, it is simply that the market is not free.