Open Source Dreaming Cloud Computing

Imagine an internet as an operating system, made up of cooperating programs, not all owned by the same company, working on an open source platform that is assembled form the work of thousands of the best global programmers… and everything works seamlessly.

If you are skeptical that this is possible, think again.

Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc. wrote last week in O’Reilly Radar:

“The “internet operating system” that I’m hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn’t social networking be a system service?

This isn’t just a “moral” appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on low level platform subsystems like storage and computation, but I continue to believe that many of the key subsystems in this evolving OS will be data subsystems, like identity, location, payment, product catalogs, music, etc. And eventually, these subsystems will need to be reasonably open and interoperable, so that a developer can build a data-intensive application without having to own all the data his application requires. This is what John Musser calls the programmable web.”

O’Reilly Media is the host of the Web 2.0 summit, Web 2.0 Expo, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention and Emerging Technology Conference, a company on the leading edge of the semantic web.

One of the key points I have been reminded of from his work is that Architecture trumps licensing or name anytime, and keeping that in mind, companies should build on services that are designed to be cooperative, rather than centralized in one silo.

What works web-globally works for your website strategy as well.

Architecture trumps all, build your site well, with silos that are internally linked cooperatively, and then continue building on this foundation with the knowledge that your architecture is solid and will support all your future endeavors.

When you have some time to read up on open source trends, Tim’s O’Reilly Media blog is fascinating, and from time to time I’ll highlight more of his insights here on Technology Goddess in the future.

~Erika