Heroku for example is cloud apps is totally open source
For those who are “resource intensive” application users, I think the Cloud concept will not be fast enough. I am speaking from experience using database publishing software. (also CAD software)
For those who have “security concerns”, I am not sure we should trust the Cloud. For that reason I think I will be using a Desktop PC for a long time to come. (and I built my first PC in 1982)
I am also a strong proponent of Open Source software, have been a Linux user for over 10 years. There are only a few applications in the Windows environment that I cannot find a corresponding Linux app for.
There’s a “I’ve looked at clouds that way” parody song
here somewhere.
Of course it won’t. I’m working on a project along these lines and we’re planning to release the code as open source. However, as they said in the Forbes article, we’re not making the ‘multi-tenant’ (<-—dumb buzzphrase...I mean, weren’t we all ‘multi-tenant’ on our Geocities accounts in the 90’s??? ) version of the application, which is quite different in many ways, open source. That’s something that is going to be making us money while we give the open source code away for free.
Wordpress is open source. I’m sure the code they run on wordpress.com is quite different from their open source offering and I don’t believe that’s open source. (I’d hope so, anyway...)
The mere existence of closed source software even from open source companies does not ‘kill’ open source. Someone is free to take the open application that we wrote and adapt it to a SaaS model if they so choose. And if they want to make that code open source, good on them. All they need is the $50k of equipment we’re using to run it on once they’re done with that and they’ll have a business. In the meantime, anyone can use the open source version on their $10/yr ‘multi-tenant’ shared hosting account.
Memory is pretty cheap so I figure there is plenty of room for both cloud and running open source on your own machine. None of the two are going away any time soon.