Thanks, I like his market payment model esp how demand modulates supply - but I believe that just the fact of payment adds admin overhead/transaction costs, and

Thanks, I like his market payment model esp how demand modulates supply - but I believe that just the fact of payment adds admin overhead/transaction costs, and slows adoption - you might as well charge a little more and make it a business. I think my suggested payment model makes Open Services easier to adopt, because it has no admin overhead. The API is there, you call it, done. It is paid for by amazon/google, because it benefits their paying customers - who indirectly pay for it. Note that they would be paying for its hosting anyway, if they deployed that open source themselves. - There would be admin savings from having just one deployment (more efficient for everyone). - And it would be just as fast, if deployed in the same cloud (theoretically - I'm assuming a coarse-grained IPC world, where apps are built by assembling services anyway, which is where we're headed. I'm thinking of it like static method calls in Java, that so get JIT inlined/stitched into one big lump at runtime, even though they are in separate modules (class files)). - Plus, these free Open Services act as an advertisement and enticement to non-EC2 users (or free users) - and once you've started using EC2-hosted Open Services, the easiest step up is of course to move to becoming a paid EC2 yourself. There's a bit of lock-in. So it is in Amazon's interest, too. So it's economically a little bit like advertiser-subsidized TV. And technologically, it's like Google's many free API's (eg. map API), but the case is more compelling for the supplier, because it costs the same to provide, but more directly pulls in paying customers. - I agree there would sometimes be issues with how much processing power it gets (Dos attacks, abuse in general), but this is a complex issue, and I think you'd need to actually run it for a time to discover the real issues and experiment with solutions. But the vast majority of open source projects are not used by anybody - these aren't using any resources (apart from memory, which is close to 0 cost), and so their cost is negligible. - once one hoster provides it, it gives them a competitive advantage, and other hosters need to match it to stay in the game. - over time, with Moore's law, the hoster's cost of providing these Open Service approaches zero. I think it's inevitable for Open Services to begin and spread (or something functionally similar).