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> Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing I'm not old enough or experienced enough with computer history t

> Nobody at that time knew or predicted that SaaS (let alone cloud computing) would be a thing I'm not old enough or experienced enough with computer history to seriously argue about this, but this statement sets off some alarm bells for me. My understanding is that extremely early on in computing history, especially early in the Internet era, people were thinking about SaaS. We had shared terminals, Sun was even trying to turn remote VMs into a feasible business model. I am very skeptical of the idea that Open Source developers never considered that someone might want to sell computer hosting or provide API access to a virtual environment. I mean, doesn't the whole problem with modern Linux security stem from the fact that it's user-specific; that it was designed around this idea that it would be running on a server and accessed by a bunch of different user accounts & terminals? It was personal computers that were the surprise, not shared hosting and remote terminals/APIs. Am I off base here? This doesn't square with how I understand computing history.

toyg 6y ago
Let’s leave alone for a moment the fact that the most permissive licenses (BSD, MIT) were not really designed, as much as they appeared out of historical accidents as a “just don’t bother us” device... When it comes to licenses that were written “with a plan”, there is a charitable reading and an uncharitable one. The charitable reading is that, back then, it was assumed that every computer user, local or remote, would have access to a compiler; and that any user would eventually learn how to operate a compiler, hence making it obvious that they would want to mod and compile the software they ran. And then they saw the licenses worked well enough to develop an ecosystem, and more or less left it at that (unless explicitly threatened, as they did when reacting to freeloading trends in embedding with the GPL 3). The less charitable reading is that they left the door open precisely because they knew it ensured demand for service providers and system administrators (which many of the original “foss hackers” were, in their day job). In any case, I don’t think anyone would have predicted they would become so dominant; everyone just assumed the big commercial vendors would be around forever, and FOSS would always be the underdog ecosystem; hence, leaving certain activities commercially unburdened would have always been somewhat necessary.
fulafel 6y ago
Cloud computing is a very slippery term to pin down. If you think about it the usage is best described tied to a an era of pay as you go services launched in the first decade of the 2000's. There's otherwise not that much in common between Google Docs, pay-as-you go VPS/VM, Kubernetes, platforms like GCP/AWS, and Dropbox.

toyg 6y ago

Let’s leave alone for a moment the fact that the most permissive licenses (BSD, MIT) were not really designed, as much as they appeared out of historical accidents as a “just don’t bother us” device... When it comes to licenses that were written “with a plan”, there is a charitable reading and an uncharitable one. The charitable reading is that, back then, it was assumed that every computer user, local or remote, would have access to a compiler; and that any user would eventually learn how to operate a compiler, hence making it obvious that they would want to mod and compile the software they ran. And then they saw the licenses worked well enough to develop an ecosystem, and more or less left it at that (unless explicitly threatened, as they did when reacting to freeloading trends in embedding with the GPL 3). The less charitable reading is that they left the door open precisely because they knew it ensured demand for service providers and system administrators (which many of the original “foss hackers” were, in their day job). In any case, I don’t think anyone would have predicted they would become so dominant; everyone just assumed the big commercial vendors would be around forever, and FOSS would always be the underdog ecosystem; hence, leaving certain activities commercially unburdened would have always been somewhat necessary.

fulafel 6y ago

Cloud computing is a very slippery term to pin down. If you think about it the usage is best described tied to a an era of pay as you go services launched in the first decade of the 2000's. There's otherwise not that much in common between Google Docs, pay-as-you go VPS/VM, Kubernetes, platforms like GCP/AWS, and Dropbox.