Open Source to Open Services

Open source has shown that simplicity can be created in the infrastructure but it still misses its potential as code still has to be designed to be installed and maintained on various platforms that are changing at uneven rates. It should rather be offered as an open service that can be combined with other services to create new services that live in the network. I do not want software I want solutions to problems. (I still like software and looking at code but i really do not need it - figuring out how Google Maps works is fun and interesting but I do not need to know how it works to use it. To integrate with it I should need to know very little but integration is still too hard.

Integration is a problem because most software is not designed to be integrated. Just as till the advent of open source most enterprise software was not designed to be easily maintained, built and deployed. A huge effort went into (and still goes into) designing software to be deployed on a large number of target platforms. This effort provides zero value to the consumer of the solution.

If the same effort by smart people went into creating simple open service interfaces as they have done to create simple maintenance and deployment for open source we would have a very rich ecology of shared services and a very different economic model. Open source is trying (and in many cases succeeding) in moving the economic model to a maintenance model - well take the next logical step and move to a complete utility model that measures economic value by ease of integration and SLA (Service Level Agreement).

The economics are on the side of shared infrastructure and software as a service. Moving to open services would dramatically increase the impact of the open source community and move the value to the SLA of the service not the portability of the service.