Open Source and Social Cloud Computing

Tim O'Reilly has written an excellent review post on Open Source and Cloud Computing which says, among other things:

The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor's private preserve.

So here's my first piece of advice: if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized. Architecture trumps licensing any time.

But peer-to-peer architectures aren't as important as open standards and protocols. If services are required to interoperate, competition is preserved. Despite all Microsoft and Netscape's efforts to "own" the web during the browser wars, they failed because Apache held the line on open standards. This is why the Open Web Foundation, announced last week at OScon, is putting an important stake in the ground. It's not just open source software for the web that we need, but open standards that will ensure that dominant players still have to play nice.

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.[...]

A key test of whether an API is open is whether it is used to enable services that are not hosted by the API provider, and are distributed across the web.

I think this API openness test is not strong enough. As I wrote in An API is a bespoke suit, a standard is a t-shirt, for me the key test is that implementations can interoperate without knowing of each others' existence, let alone having to have a business relationship. That's when you have an open spec.

The other thing I resist in the idea of an internet operating system is that that the net is composable, not monolithic. You can swap in and implementations of different pieces, and combine different specs that solve one piece of the problem without having to be connected to everything else.

The original point of the cloud was a solved piece of the problem that means you don't have to worry about the internal implementation.

Thus, the answer to "shouldn't social networking be a system service?" is yes, it should be a Social Cloud. That's exactly what we are working on in OpenSocial.