Showing posts with label commoditisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commoditisation. Show all posts

30 December 2011

OpenStreetMap: The Next Wave Of Commoditization For Startups?

One of the striking features of some of the most successful startups over the last ten years – companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter – is that their infrastructure is based almost entirely around open source. Of course, that shouldn't really be surprising: open source allows people to get prototypes up and running for the price of a PC, which is great for trying out ideas with live code. And yet despite these zero-cost origins, open source software scales up to supercomputing levels - the perfect solution for startups that hope to grow. 

On Techdirt.

02 March 2011

Open Source by Any Other Name...

As I noted on Tuesday, the UK government has been pretty much a total disaster when it comes to using open source. Indeed, it has arguably been a total disaster when it comes to using computers of any kind, spending far more on this area than any comparable European government. Moreover, the stuff is almost always late, and rarely works properly.

On Open Enterprise blog.

03 June 2009

Why Chemical Software Will be Open Source

Here's an important post from Mr Open Chemistry, Peter Murray-Rust:


“Chemical software will be Open Source”

This statement expresses both a simple truth (Simple Future, see WP) and an aspiration (Coloured Future – Software shall be free). The latter is what I have been advocating on this blog – the moral, pragmatic, utilitarian value of Open Source. The former simply states that it will happen. IOW a betting person could lay a wager.

The heart of Peter's argument is this:

there is a particular aspect to “Chemoinformatics” - the software that supports the management of chemical compounds, reactions and their measured and computed properties:

There have been no new developments in the last decade

What I mean by this is that there have been no new algorithms or information management strategy to have come out of commercial chemoinformatics manufacturers. Chemical search, heuristic properties and fingerprints, molecule docking are “solved” problems. And advance comes from packaging, integration and parameter_tweaking/machine_learning. Only the last adds to science and since the commercial manufacturers are secretive then we can’t measure this (and I believe this to be mainly pseudoscience in its practice – you can make extravagant plans without independent assessment). So the advances from the manufacturers have been engineering – ease of use, deployability, interoperation with third-party software – but not functionality.

So the Open Source community – the Blue Obelisk – is catching up. I believe that OSCAR is already the best chemical language processing tool, that OPSIN will soon be as good as any commercial name2structure parser and that OSRA will do the same for chemical images.

What this essentially means is that chemoinformatics has become commoditised; and as history has shown us time and again, once that happens, the advantages of open source in terms of aggregated, distributed development kick in. It is proprietary software that does not scale - ironically, given the prevailing wisdom to the contrary - and which therefore always falls behind open source projects once a particular domain has matured.

This is not to say that free software never innovates, as I've discussed elsewhere; simply that in new sectors open source's advantages are less clear than they are in mature ones. Peter's point is that chemoinformatics in particular is ripe for open source to produce better versions of existing tools; and the implication is that as successive areas of science software become similarly mature, so free software offerings will move in and ultimately take over.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

19 January 2009

Open Source Microblogging and the Enterprise

One of the easy predictions for 2009 is that it will be the year that Twitter breaks through into the mainstream (for some suitable definition of mainstream.) The good news is that Twitter uses lots of open source and plans to use even more....

On Open Enterprise blog.

19 September 2008

Cisco Reduces Messaging to Just Jabber

Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately held Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. Based in Denver, Jabber will work with Cisco to enhance the existing presence and messaging functions of Cisco's Collaboration portfolio.

As several have pointed out, open source doesn't really enter into the equation - or even get a mention in the press release. That's not surprising: Cisco neither gets nor cares about free software. For Cisco, this is just some pretty icing, which it will doubtless distribute freely. Everyone else can now forget about making money in messaging.