Comments on: The Tragedy of the Commons in Cloud standards

By: Mike Leach

Mike Leach — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:24:03 +0000

If there is the potential for a “tragedy of the commons” in the cloud, it would be that large cloud companies are building on open source (taking) and technically are not violating the GPL when not giving back their enhancements because “redistribution” doesn’t extend to a server hosting context.

Fortunately, Google and other companies have built sufficient goodwill by giving back to the open source community in many different ways, so few developers want to force the issue (Most OS project leads are even hired to work at these companies). But still, many forks are being held close to the chest.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/applications/gpl-author-google-must-share-code-288

By: Neill Turner

Neill Turner — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:47:41 +0000

Well I don’t really care about these low-level Cloud Standards. They will just become commodities. In fact the faster we can commoditize the Infrastructure as as Service (IaaS) layer the better. The real standards benefit will be in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) layer that will be built on top of the IaaS layer.
-Think SQL database services that auto scale etc etc all you do is drop in your SQL.
-Programming services where similarly you just drop in your code and it all runs.
-lots more.
These services will appear once the IaaS layer is commoditized and will have alot of business benefit. Currently there is too much variety in the IaaS clouds to build these. I expect a lot of effort going on in the IaaS layer will just go up the river when commoditization happens. I think Amazon understand this. They just create commodities as cheap, reliable, secure and scalable as possible. Everything else is irrelevant for Infrastructure as a Service.

By: William (@vambenepe on Twitter)

William (@vambenepe on Twitter) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:22:02 +0000

Andrew, I think there is a good argument to be made that this is indeed a “prisoner’s dilemma” type of situation if we assume that preventing premature standardization increases the size of the “Cloud market” pie, which I can easily believe.

The “duel” suggestion makes me realize that it may be for the better that we failed to find a mutually convenient time and place to meet when you were in town a week ago…

By: Andrew Clay Shafer

Andrew Clay Shafer — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:30:43 +0000

I thought about this more, and I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but I still think the standards situation is more appropriately labeled an nxn prisoners dilemma.

My rationale is that a ‘tragedy of the commons’ is typified by the depletion of a shared common resource while the ‘prisoners dilemma’ is typified by the choices made changing the dynamics and consequences of the choices of others.

Your standards for choosing metaphors is clearly flawed.

I’m suggest we settle this the gentlemanly way all standards debates should be… a duel with pistols.

By: Jayadeep Purushothaman

Jayadeep Purushothaman — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 03:38:15 +0000

If you look at the Unix standardization efforts where every unix vendor was involved, the ultimate winner was Microsoft! And finally a de-facto standard evolved in the form of Linux! So I am not so sure about your thoughts here.

By: Mike Leach

Mike Leach — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:49:07 +0000

If we use Nicholas Carr’s metaphor that the cloud will evolve like electric utilities, then we only need the 120V at 60Hz equivalent as a standard.

I would argue we already have that with TCP/IP running on x86. Anything else built on top of that is fair game in the cloud.