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Why Free / Open Source Software is doomed and Google could be our worst enemy

Submitted by Lotyrin on Thu, 2009-10-15 14:58

I hate to draw a negative image here, but Open Source and Free Software are under great threats as we move forward.

The GNU General Public License, the backbone of Free Software is marching toward its future death. Being a software license - like any sort of intellectual property (IP) license, it depends on international enforcement of IP law. That enforcement doesn't really exist now, and will only continue to weaken as we approach singularity.

I won't describe The Singularity here (I assume you are already familliar), but I will describe my predictions of its ramifications in the software world:

  • As processing power per unit energy and per unit volume decrease, processing power will increasingly be located in data centers.
  • As internet bandwidth increases, latency decreases, prices drop and wireless coverage area increases, consumer electronics devices will become increasingly “thin” clients to services in datacenters.
  • As users’ knowledge of technology increases, and the taboo of piracy continues to fade, the amount of software that a user actually buys a license for will approach zero
  • As processing power in data centers increases and potential for profit on licensed software decreases, software products that use the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model will approach 100%.

You’ll be able to buy a handheld, phone-like device within the next decade that runs all of your applications (remotely), having a CPU that won'y need to be much faster than those of today, but using so little power as to be able to run off of background RF radiation for weeks at a time.

Within the same period of time, you’ll be able to buy a monitor that also includes a CPU, although slightly more powerful than the one in the phone, and also acts as front end to remote services.

The idea of the personal computer (a box on the floor that stores anything), the cellular phone (actually storing your contacts and running apps locally) and the laptop (having a hard drive for storing, with a price of any more than a netbook) will become extinct.

In this future, it becomes increasingly tempting for any international corporation to create a subsidiary in a foreign nation with little to no IP law, take a bunch of Open Source software, spend developer hours and a large budget improving it, then market their new software products as SaaS, and never give the code improvements back. Many F/OSS licenses don’t even protect against this process when IP law is in effect.

Whatever device you use to connect to these services could easily be running 100% F/OSS, but it doesn't matter.

SaaS makes DRM look like a fuzzy bunny wielding a cotton swab. More and more companies are selling SaaS, and even more are buying. There is a humongous future threat that all of your software is going to be in a data center, and you won’t get any of the code. A humongous threat that all of your data is going to be vendor locked into those services with no way out.

This is already happening. Google is a top user of F/OSS. They are one of the largest holders of data center capacity. You might already have an Android Phone, storing data on a box at Google somewhere, making and receiving calls over Google Voice. It's pretty nice now, better than the alternatives. Google of today isn’t especially bad about letting you get your data out, and is good about sharing code, but as they continue to grow in the next decade, how far could they continue to stray from “Don’t be evil”?