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In his latest blog post, Roman Stanek contemplated about the disruptive effect of cloud computing. We already experienced its power in relation to the boom of social networking and as he notes it is undoubtedly going to disrupt the business model behind commercial software. Now, Roman asks how it will affect the open source movement?

For me the answer to this question lies in the position of the cloud computing itself. As a technology it’s nothing more than an evolutionary step. To understand my view let’s make a step back and have a look into the history and see what preceded our latest source of buzz.

First here was a network connectivity. Back in 1995 I tried to build my very first ISP. Daring I hear you saying? It certainly was. Some tried to fight it, some opposed it, most of us were amazed by the possibilities (however limited at the time) and the others were just oblivious. Connectivity was scarce, expensive and limited. As adoption progressed all these problems started to disappear. By the end of the 90s connectivity wasn’t any longer a privilege but a commodity. Bought, resold, aggregated, and extended. Would you even considering building own ISP today? I doubt so [1].

Next on the line was hosting. Everybody who missed the ISP game, and even ISPs themselves, entered a big chase for the ultimate hosting package. Story is the same as with connectivity. Originally it was scarce, expensive and limited. And its fate is similar as well. Hosting as a service has been commodified. You know the story.

As our needs increased, the next step was to focus on data centres. Transit connectivity and mass demand for hosting services increased pressure to provide huge data centres. Server provisioning become important. Numbers changed, from dozens to hundreds, from hundreds to thousands. You can probably guess what I’m going to say: it was scarce, expensive and limited. Physical kit just wasn’t enough. Virtualization matured and brought as where we are know. Into the cloud age.

Open source played major role in these transformations. As the need for commodification increased pressure to lower the price, existing software business models couldn’t cope with the increasing competition from the free software. Model started to changing into *aaS. Not much longer after that the open source technologies stopped being perceived as a disruption but rather as a competitive advantage.

Now it’s a good time to go back to Roman’s post. Where I agree with him is the fact the utility computing provides excellent environment for OSS to flourish. And increasingly complex world needs to be build on stable and open APIs, protocols and standards. Where my view differs is possible solution to the ‘problem’ open source is facing.

First I don’t really see a problem in the bazaar style development in the cloud perspective. Cloud computing, as it stands right now, is still in its infancy. And although we started calling our servers instances, talking about OS-level abstraction/virtualization and focusing on the streamlining provisioning, we are pretty much repeating what we’ve done before. Just changed the business model and created new horizons. Despite my reluctance, from perspective of innovation the future of the cloud computing is better characterized by platforms (like Google App Engine) – not IaaS as we perceive it today. For me underlying technology does not longer matter. I’m happy to leave so-called Cloud OS to existing providers. Because if I use the analogy of the internet connectivity and hosting, they are going to be cannibalized by their own approach. Bought, resoled and aggregated.

Second, I would like to use Roman’s terminology and change the outcome from two colliding solutions into their natural progression.

• For me Benevolent dictators are just a logical mark of the evolution itself. Leading providers will keep their stack closed for a certain (very limited) time, no matter if it’s build on open or closed source technologies. But with the growing demand to facilitate the interoperability and facing increasing competition at the same time it’s predictable they will open-source their complete stacks in order to utilize their momentum. In order to stay on top of the race, existing players will be ultimately forced to initiate commodification of the cloud services itself and expand their offering. For this to happen there are still some prerequisites we’re missing – at least standardisation of APIs/models behind IaaS and unified measurement of the cloud mass/computing power/matter. The signs of this development are already visible.

• The new model will eventually follow. The rational behind it is very simple. Industry wouldn’t be any longer able to build solutions on top of the increasingly complex architectures and face lack of the skilled professionals like you and me. As Roman pointed out, change itself will bring rise of conflicting opinions. In past, we managed to get over the virtual memory allocation, running our code within the virtual machines and cloud computing itself (as it’s just happening). But all these concepts addressed only existing problems. Now we’re facing new challenges. Building stones are already here – take *aaS, SOA, REST, hypermedia, microformats, orchestration and who knows what else, put it together and whoever will get the simple result will deliver it as a winner. Open source will definitely play important role not just as a facilitator for competitive advantage, but also as a instrument for companies to off-load their products when they become commoditized.

To summarize my rather long post, I believe the question is not how cloud computing will affect the movement itself. In my mind, open source complements cloud computing, exactly as mass production allowed commodification of physical goods. The question is whatever the cloud is going to provide future platform for open source concept adoption even outside the IT industry? Social networking is certainly showing us the way. But to find the answer is outside the scope of this post…

[1] This analogy perfectly reflects my view on the private clouds.