What Open Source Can’t Do
xobni.com
xobni.com
If we're thinking in terms of "Open Source applied to services", well, Wikipedia. That's a pretty big website thinger there. I'm not sure I'd want to stare down the sysadmins of WikiMedia an inform them, "No guys, no, see, you're not really hosting..."
Linux kernel?
Pretty much all of the software that is "like x, only free" (or in the case of firefox, better)
I'd agree with that one.
Free software allows you to take an individual copy then run it yourself or even run a company. It's not as if Free or Open source software has to serve the market any more than that.
Sensationalist headline, but it seems that it's the only kind of headline that works on the web these days.
I really don't know what the state of P2P or decentralized systems are, so tell me if this sounds crazy or not. Maybe someone could develop a secure, trusted, reliable system for distributed execution of sandboxed code which relies on the BitTorrent sort of sharing is caring strategy. That'd be pretty sweet :-)
But it'd be useful, so please go ahead and solve it :)
As for policing the internet, I think that personal responsibility for your actions needs to apply even when you act using a computer. The consequences of your actions should to be reasonable though, and not like what we're seeing now with file sharing lawsuits.
That kind of defense hasn't worked very well in filesharing cases (or has it? at least I'm under the impression that it hasn't), and is even less likely to work if the offense is more severe. Like when the infamous "terrorist networks" put things there, or the kiddie porn people. At the very least you'll get hit for aiding the baddies.
I suppose it'll have to be a serious problem for someone to make the effort of finding and decoding the data, but I don't doubt that sooner or later someone will decide that it's worth it.
If there's going to be processing of the data, and not just storage, the local node will need to have access to the encryption keys. That should make the work of the investigator easier. With enough cunning trickery it'll probably be hard to find them, but with access to the hardware I have no doubt that it's doable.
Hm. So the work needs to be done in a virtual machine that is given access to a local file storage and the freeserve (let's call it that, sounds nice) network. The vm needs to query the network for tasks to be performed, download the data for the task, process it, and upload the result.. Should be a fun project to design it.
Fairly simple. Except for all the technical and legal problems :)
Just running a Freenet node doesn't it of course, but I was thinking of the 'peer-to-peer servers in the cloud' thing.
You underestimate modern cryptography. Or to give a simplified model: Imagine you just had blobs of encrypted data that you served and the requester would do all the processing.
Statistical software (like R), perhaps? Not sure how much it's used by businesses though, especially with alternatives like SAS, or data mining built into Oracle & SQL Server. Still, hosted data analysis sounds cool (with potential complexities as well).
But, if you or your co-founder isn't a PhD in the field you choose to tackle, you'll probably have a hard time getting a foothold.
Depending on your circle, some do. gChat is runs off the Jabber protocol. On the Mac, Adium is one of the best (I don't know about most popular) multi-system clients out there. I'm also partial to Pidgin Linux.
But I do need Django, I do need libraries like ipaddr.py from Google, I do need Linux kernel, I do need Webkit. One by one the majority of those libraries don't solve big problems. But combined they do.
And as for developers, they can stop worrying that somebody will take their open source code and clone their major project and start releasing chunks of code that is actually interesting. Let's be clear, most of the code is pretty much the same everywhere and is not interesting.
This is what heroku.com and seasidehosting.st offer. It does seem an opportunity for super low cost of entry apps. I don't know about how either scale if you get popular; presumably there comes a point where you have to rethink the infrastructure.
"what open source software exists that solves a big problem in a large market?" Linux, Apache, mySQL, etc.
I actually like this. It's the most obvious way to capitalize on open source.
There are many other examples of the "open source business model," such as Dries Buytaert who runs Drupal and Acquia.
The point is that contributors to open source projects are willing to write code for free but not willing to wear the beepers that go off when the servers go down.
But could you get 100 people to wear beepers if you told them there was only a 1% chance it'd go off?
(It's a rhetorical question. I've seen what ten part-time sysadmins can do; I don't want to imagine 100.)