|
·
·
 The furor over "open" cloud computing seems
to have abated a bit. It may rekindle as Cloud Expo approaches, when
most companies in the industry will stake and re-stake their marketing
positions. So, revisiting a bit, what is "open cloud" all about?
Cloudscaling
ignited things early in the week of February 13 by re-launching the company as a full-on open cloud infrastructure provider. Co-founder & CTO Randy Bias, known for
his forthright views, quickly recognized the controversy and defended the
company's position.
He wrote:
"This weeks' re-launch of Cloudscaling was amazing...(but) we had some
misfires early on and some controversy right after the new website
launch." He noted that Juniper Networks Senior Director and influential
writer Christofer Hoff even accused Cloudscaling of "openwashing," a
harsh term that book-ends the alleged "cloudwashing" by big
enterprise IT providers, something that's reviled by the open-source
community.
But Randy
maintains the controversy is one of "a failure to communicate" more
than anything else. He stressed that the words "open" and "cloud" should
be viewed as a collective term, ie, the scalability of cloud doesn't imply
that everything that is open is scalable. "As long-time readers know, I've always been uncomfortable with the term "enterprise
cloud," he notes.
He also
detailed his views on a short video at the company website, stressing the
difference between traditional enterprise computing and applications, and a
new era of new apps that are deployed via cloud computing. He thus turns the
openwashing argument back to the original focus on cloudwashing: "Here's
the problem," he writes, "everyone with an ‘enterprise cloud' believes it's a
cloud and their vendors tell them it's a cloud."
In contrast, he says that Cloudscaling will offer "open (freely
available, no-vendor-lock-in, preferably open-licensed) PLUS cloud (elastic,
scalable, secure, robust)."
OpenWashing doesn’t really work.
by GIL YEHUDA on JANUARY
6, 2011
Recently someone asked me about OpenWashing. Let me share my thoughts here. OpenWashing is
a derogatory term for companies who pretend to “do open source.” (We’ll discuss what that could mean.) The term is related
to WhiteWashing (censoring information in order to “fix” history) and GreenWashing(portraying your product to be more environmentally
sensitive than it really is). An ironic problem with OpenWashing is
that it does not work. OpenWashers try to mislead. But Open
Source is quite resistant to deception (it’s one of the
things that makes Open Source so interesting to me). It’s pretty
obvious when you try to OpenWash, so it backfires.
The term “do open source” means,
what? It’s pretty unclear. Unfortunately, people use it to mean
different things — causing confusion. Here are three of the more common
meanings I come across:
1.
Using: Using
Open Source products / tools instead ofproprietary software within your company: e.g.
using Linux vs. Windows servers in your server farm, using OpenOffice instead
of Microsoft Office for your knowledge workers, supporting Firefox in
addition to Internet Explorer. A variation of “using” is to
use Open Source code in your development for products and tools.
2.
Selling:
Releasing the source code to your technology products — and thereby in
effect, selling something other than code. This is similar to the freemium model (offering a limited
product for free, and a full product for money), or to underpricing your
products in order to sell services for them. A variant of this is to
offer a restrictive Open Source license for free and a permissive commercial
license for cost.
3.
Giving: Allowing
your non-product, non-essential code to be released as Open Source. i.e.
Giving stuff away. Variants of the this include releasing code that
shows how to use your products or that helps enable the use of your product
in other platforms.
Note how very different these three are — and yet,
people will say “I work in an Open Source company”, and you’re not really
sure what they mean. And there are many variants to the three
behaviors above — so the term “doing Open Source” has other potential
meanings too.
Each of the above behaviors has value to a company.
There are real benefits and real risks in 1. using Open Source, 2.
selling services on free software or 3. publishing and contributing to Open
Source projects. Many companies have some sort of policy (de jure and de facto) about
how they leverage the benefits and address the risks. Openness is
usually considered “a good thing” to be. (Just don’t reveal
confidential information about your clients in the open!)
OpenWashing comes into play regarding
various variants of #2 and #3. In the case of selling
technology products, a company can give something for free, but customers may
find a need to pay for something. Some people call this OpenWashing, since
they go in thinking this is free, but end up paying for something. I don’t
see this as a real problem. People who think they get things for
free are naive — and it’s healthy for them to get a wake up call in the form
of an invoice. Remember Heinlein’s acronym: TANSTAAFL.
Sure there are free products out there — but companies have a responsibility
to be companies. They will give things for free for good business
reasons. You can’t be angry at a company for not being a charity.
Payment eventually happens somewhere in the process.
Another form of OpenWashing comes into play when a
company publishes code to Open Source, but does not accept code contributions
from others (or does so in a very limited way). This makes other
developers upset because they want to contribute (usually to improve the
code), but can’t. So when a company simply “codes in public” it looks
like they are “doing Open Source”, but it’s not a two-way street. Still
I don’t have as much of a problem with this when it’s made clear. Yes,
you might get upset that it’s not fully open — but that’s the choice a
company can make when they publish code. Indeed the company will fail
to get many of the benefits of Open Source (e.g. crowdsourcing bug-fixes, evolving
the project to novel directions, building real partnership with the community
of interest around that code), but it will get some benefits (transparency
leading to trust, motivation to write better code, kudos to the hard-working
developers, etc.). Sometimes it’s the right choice for them to make.
They should make it clear and usually do.
Open Source has taught companies that they have to give
in order to get. When companies limit what they give, they will limit
what they get, but that’s a business choice. <foo>Washing
takes place when someone deceives. But deception does not work so well
in Open Source cases, since you can see what is going on. Let me know
you have seen cases where someone deceives their community using Open Source,
I’m interested to learn if I’m missing something here.
Open-ness is currently a strong cultural value.
We want companies to be open with us. If you saw the recent
movie Tron Legacy you
might recall Sam Flynn’s heroic entrance as the good guy in the movie.
The main character’s motivation for being the largest shareholder of
the evil technology corporation was to steal their code and opensource it.
(Ignore the ethics and legalities here, it’s just a movie.)
So when we hear a company say they are “doing Open
Source” some people get very excited. We want them to be very open, and
we want stuff to be very free. In some cases we may be disillusioned
when we find out the details — companies are still companies. If it’s
open and honest, then customers will usually respect it. If not, they
will be very open in their feedback. And that’s healthy for both sides.
|
沒有留言:
張貼留言