Marcus Cake

Open source communities have developed a critical mass of tools and are beginning to morph into the development of solutions (see The next four stages of online networks). Amazon’s elastic cloud is a critical building block that will support the next wave of economic development (see Build an ebusiness application on your desktop and drag and drop it onto Amazon’s elastic cloud to scale ) . Moore’s law has been improving information technology at a rapid rate for more than 40 years. In isolation, each technology advance represents a rapid advance in a technology area. The combination of these technologies can now deliver a paradigm shift which presents new opportunities for economic development. This article is focussed on how elastic clouds and open source communities can provide virtual building blocks for business and social entrepreneurs building tomorrows disruptive structures.

Amazon could morph into something else entirely, November 2006 (forum post)

“I think the days where everybody spends time on managing their data, or hires IT administrators and buys servers and all the attendant headaches are going to be history in the next 10 years. Small businesses, freelancers, consultants will particularly benefit from this paradigm change, and cut out all the middlemen and overhead.Online services and renting computer power on demand are absolutely the wave of the future.”

“If someone at Amazon is farsighted enough to assemble a “virtual company template” which integrates a ticketing system, elastic compute cloud, a CRM and customer database, version control, backup, standard “office” online applets storing documents into the S3 file system, standard company website template with an integrated product download and payment system, and a tax/expenses template, there will be a worldwide exodus of cubicle dwellers and programmers itching to create new products (Me and my friends included ). Amazon could well emerge as the new universal infrastructure on which startups and future e-commerce/software companies are built, and Microsoft and its online services initiative will be left far behind. But the above requires execution and vision, and a lot of luck in being at the right place and the right time. Time will tell.”

Amazon will provide the utility computing service. The open source community will combine elastic clouds with other open source software to deliver compelling solutions. Their focus will quickly switch from tools to solutions. The desire to contribute will see members of the open source community and others from different disciplines help create solutions. Perhaps, we will have one person in the world devoted to the best PHP/Mysql server, the best Zimbra server or the best how-to guide. We will have many different solutions that can switched on in the clouds, or dragged from desktop to cloud. We can now leverage open source tools to create solutions that present a significant opportunity for economic development. There are solutions available in the clouds today (Please see EC2’s public AMI instances). This online directory lists working operating systems, email servers, LAMP servers and dedicated servers running open source applications. A full web server is provided by webmin (click here for details). A user simply needs to start the instance and it (should) work. While everybody could probably make use of these tools, only hackers could deal with any problems that are likely to occur.

The structures to be created by combining these solutions can be left to the imagination of business and social entrepreneurs all over the world.