On monday, a new blog dedicated exclusively for cloud computing, called Cloud Avenue, will be launched. I am joining the team of bloggers from all over the world, including Zoli Erdos and Ben Kepes. Zoli has written a detailed post about this new initiative. Zoho, a major player in the SaaS, is sponsoring the blog totally and there will be no ads on it. Even though Zoho is sponsoring the blog, we, the editors, will have full independence and we will be critical of any shortcomings we see in Zoho, just like any other company in the marketplace.

I am pretty excited about this blog as it gives me an opportunity to write about hot topics that are pushing the envelope of computing to a whole new level. Even though this blog is more about opensource, I have written a few posts on the topic of cloud computing. Now I will write about cloud computing exclusively on the new blog and use this blog to talk about issues related to opensource. I am also excited about working with Zoho folks as they are a company with a base in my home town (in India). I have bumped into Zoli on and off at various blogs, social networks, etc.. This is the first time I will be working closely with him. It was a great pleasure to get introduced to Ben and other folks in the Cloud Avenue team. The most interesting part is that we are spread all over the world and we use the SaaS apps to collaborate and diminish any effect of this geographic distribution. This is the advantage we can derive by moving the computing away from our desktop to the clouds. I am pretty sure this team will make Cloud Avenue a one stop shop for everything cloud computing.

I also want to point out that our company in India consults clients on the advantages of moving their operations to cloud. We have seen how small businesses in India and Asia-Pacific regions have benefited from cloud computing. The experience I gain(ed), by being part of the team working in India, will also help me refine my posts but I will not promote anything that will benefit our company in my posts on the Cloud Avenue blog.

The blog will be launched on monday but it shouldn’t stop you from subscribing to the feed today itself. Come on over and walk with us down the Cloud Avenue.

Update: The site is live now.

Gogrid offers a service similar to Amazon’s EC2. The folks at Linux Journal recently caught up with them in Linuxworld Expo. Here is the video of that interview

PS: Probably, this is the last time I might be posting something related to cloud computing. Soon, I am joining a blog about cloud computing as a member of their editorial team. I will post my thinking about the field in that blog and focus on open source, open standards and open web in this blog.

I am attending Gnomedex this year (Courtesy: Chris Pirillo). This is the first time I am attending this conference and I am hoping to have fun. I was following Gnomedex last year on Ustream.tv and twitter back channel (participating in the heckling of Jason Calacanis by Dave Winer). I will keep updating this post whenever I have time. I will be regularly updating twitter and you can follow me there.

The first talk was by Kris Krug. He gave some photography tips.

I don’t talk politics in this blog (and have other outlets to vent my feelings) but I can’t help in this case. Conservatives pull back any attempts to push the envelope while dealing with social issues by inculcating fear in the minds of people. That is what is happening with regards to cloud computing too. Those companies whose business interests are threatened by cloud computing and those in media who are wedded to these companies and their technology, are unleashing a wave of fear about cloud computing. The traditionalists in the software world take an upcoming promising technology that is still in its infancy and use fear tactics to seed confusion in the minds of users. We saw a security meme in the blogosphere that cast a huge shadow of vulnerability on the very concept of cloud computing. Then, with the release of Kaminsky’s DNS exploit in the wild, people are talking about how it exposes the inherent security risks in the cloud computing world. If you are someone who is bitten by this fear bug, I want to point out that all these vulnerabilities they point out (and even more) exist in the current world of online services and traditional software too. We saw similar wave of fear when email was gaining traction. The threats of spam and phishing still exists but we are not going back to using snail mail. The scenario is similar in the case of cloud computing. There are threats to cloud computing and I am not denying it. But if you do the risk benefit analysis, the advantage of cloud computing outweighs the threat factor. Also, the scenario is similar to what happened when we changed from person to person direct talking to telephonic conversations. It is same as what happened when we changed from snail mail to email. The threats shouldn’t force us to shut down cloud computing. If we do it, then the threat wins. Instead, we should take on the threats to cloud computing head on and try to minimize the impact. We should focus on developing better cloud technologies that eliminate these threats. More than anything else, we should realize that all these security threats (pointed out in the cloud security meme and talk about how Kaminsky exploit can affect cloud computing) exists in the case of traditional software services and in the current day data center based traditional web hosting approaches. Let us look forward than look backwards due to the wave of fear unleashed by traditionalists.

The folks at Whir TV talked to James Staten of Forrester Research the cloud computing and how it fits into enterprise. You can watch the video below.

Related articles

• Study: Cloud computing to brighten future of data centers

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As cloud computing grows and matures, there are many vendors who venture into Software as a Service model (SaaS) targeting small and medium businesses. Recently, I was talking to a CEO of a small firm from across the world and he asked me the difference between SaaS and ASP (Application Service Providers) of the previous decade. I thought I will write a post here explaining the difference in case if others have similar questions as well. For those of you who came here with an expectation to see posts related to Open Web, I would like to point out that Cloud Computing is also part of the open web and this post highlights the importance of SaaS models built on the cloud. Since cloud computing and the business based on clouds is of interest to me, I will post some posts on these topics too.

SaaS and ASP have a somewhat similar philosophy but there are many differences that makes SaaS more competent in the marketplace than the ASP in the previous era. Lemme, explain the differences in this post.

• ASP was single tenancy whereas SaaS has multi tenancy. This offers SaaS the much needed ability to scale. ASP was limited to single organization and hence high cost of implementation. Since SaaS is shared by multiple organizations, without compromising on the reliability, security and privacy, the cost for businesses is very minimal compared to the implementation of ASP.
• In many cases, the underlying cloud is built upon open source software. The application stack also uses open source software overwhelmingly. This reduces the cost of infrastructure by several fold, thereby, bringing down the cost of implementation to a much smaller level. Today, a small business having three employees can have CRM fro free and a company with 5 employees can have it for as low as $24 per month. I am not sure about Zoho’s infrastructure but many SaaS vendors rely heavily on open source software and the associated cost savings (plus the cost savings due to multi tenancy) is passed on to the customers.
• Some SaaS vendors offer the source code under one of the open source licenses. This helps organizations some reliability in the case of SaaS vendor going out of business. As I have explained in some of the previous posts, businesses can take the source code and their data and host it anywhere in the cloud. Since the cost of cloud infrastructure is almost close to zero, this option saves a huge amount of money for businesses compared to the ASP approach.
• Unlike the ASP approach, SaaS vendors can release a particular version and it shows up for all the customers. This reduces the time and cost involved in support and security implementation. Unlike ASP, all the SaaS customers will be using the same version of the app.
• Another important aspect of SaaS vis a vis ASP is the pay as you go model (which I forgot to add in the original post and Peter Laird pointed out in the comments). This is very important from small business perspective. This kinda approach is akin to utilities where you pay only for what you use rather than a fixed amount every month.

There are various other advantages of SaaS over ASP. I am just pointing out to some of the advantages that are important according to many industry analysts (including me :-)).

PS: The basic structure of this article is based on one of the old articles on the topic by Julie Craig in one of the Internet.com reports. I added my ideas about cloud computing and open source to that structure.

Wired has an article in which they report about Bill Gates’ comments on Opensource.

One thing Gates won’t be leaving behind in retirement is his distaste for open source software. After one scientist asked if Gates would consider open source uses in health research, the man who built his $280 billion company on the power of intellectual property bristled.

"There’s free software and then there’s open source," he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we’re aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: "I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them," he said, adding with a shrug: "That may seem radical."

The funny part about the whole episode, aside from his ignorance on the matter, is that he is saying to scientists that their approach in academia, which was responsible for propelling the world to the current advanced state, is nonsense. It is time for him to realize that opensource itself was inspired by the scientists in academia. Bill Gates joins Jaron Lanier in his ignorance about science.

Craig Balding raises the following issues related to security cloud computing. Since some of the issues concern to the theme of this blog, opensource, open standards and open web, I thought I will link the concerns here. Some of the issues highlight the need to have a cloud computing infrastructure without any proprietary software infrastructure.

Multiple cloud storage providers for a single app, raises some issues.

* Is ISV obligated to tell you they are migrating to a cheaper cloud storage provider? (think cross border data transfer issues).
* What security ‘certification’ will take place of the new provider and what visibility will you have of that?
* How much notification do you get before the switchover?
* If you don’t want to go with the new provider, but that is the only supported option, what happens to all your data? Even if we *assume* an export function is provided you still need to find an alternate ISV that has coded a compatibility layer to access your existing data. If you can’t, where do you export the data too? Will we have ‘frozen clouds‘?
* What integrity checks take place to ensure data was properly migrated over?
* When the migration happens, what clean-up happens at the source? (can anyone say forensic wiping?). What about any backup tapes or off-line copies? Who is responsible for making sure those are wiped/destroyed?

Opensource Economics is still new for many people. Here, Law professor Yochai Benkler explains what it is and how it is shaping the human society.

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Reuven Lerner makes an excellent case against OOXML at OStatic

Unfortunately, yesterday’s adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard fails on all three counts. To begin with, it seems that the OOXML standard was poorly defined, leaving a huge number of ambiguities and undefined terms. That’s not surprising, given the fact that it is 6,000 — yes, six thousand — pages long, a size which makes it nearly impossible to ensure internal consistency. The large size also ensures that it will be difficult to create alternative implementations; would you like to be the programmer charged with checking that a particular program adheres to all 6,000 pages of the standard?

Moreover, parts of the standard require a programmer to deviate from many other, correct standards. For example, 1900 was not a leap year, as is the case with three out of every four “00″ years. (Thus, 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was.) Microsoft got this point wrong when they first implemented Excel, and as a result, the OOXML standard requires that implementers make this same error, for the sake of consistency.

There are also serious questions regarding some Microsoft patents that any implementer will need to use. Microsoft has promised that it will not sue OOXML implementers for patent infringement, but the Groklaw site points out that this statement might be meaningless.

I wrote this post at a time when Readburner was crucified and before its current resurrection. In that post, I had suggested that companies entering deadpool should consider releasing their code under one of the opensource licenses. I made this argument to emphasize that it will build trust among the customers in this era of apps residing on the web rather than on the user’s computers. It was my argument that if the web app is also released as open source (as the in case of apps like wordpress and some wikis we have talked about in the previous posts), users will not be left in the lurch (in the event of a company shutting its doors).

Today Marshall posted about the AJAX based photo sharing site Zoto releasing its source code under an opensource license. There is no information about the company entering the deadpool. But, if it ever enters the deadpool, it won’t have any effect on their customers because they can simply take the source code and get it installed in their own servers. This is the kinda approach that will get people to trust the startups offering web apps. I just hope that the other startups follow Zoto in releasing their code under an opensource license. This ensures that the web app will live forever, irrespective of whether the company behind the app is part of the history or not.

and the winner is Linux. Check it out here. My question is: Why do you need a contest to know this?

Adobe today released AIR framework for Linux. It is still in Alpha version and you can download it here. You can find the release notes here. Also, read the writeup by Josh Catone and Ryan Stewart.

Adobe AIR is not an open source software. However, it excites me because it is the only framework (right now) that offers the same kinda experience on all three operating systems, Linux, Mac and Windows. The apps developed on AIR framework works flawlessly on these operating systems. This is a very important for the following reasons.

• Both data and apps are moving to the cloud, thereby, making desktops redundant. With this shift, we are more worried about the open standards used in the storage of our data in the cloud and data portability than the open source nature of the underlying software. In a way, open source, as we know it from the previous era, is losing steam to other ideas like open standards, data portability, open publishing, etc.. However, open source doesn’t become irrelevant in the SaaS world, as people like Tim O’ Reilly would like you to believe. Open source is the precursor for the Web 2.0 movements like Data Portability and others. Also, the idea of open source code is very important even in the case of web apps as we have seen with wordpress and wikis. Having said that, we have to accept the fact that the desktop, as we knew it from the past, is slowly getting redundant. The future desktops may not need high computing capacity. We could have a reasonably powerful desktop/laptop and derive the necessary computing power from the cloud. This has resulted in a wave of “cloud PCs and Laptops” running Linux. Adobe AIR on Linux is very important for these Linux based cloud PCs to gain traction. The user experience offered by AIR apps will help propel Linux based cloud machines into the mainstream, eventually resulting in more Linux adoption.
• With the buggy releases of Vista and Leopard and the prominence gained by Ubuntu, there is an opening for Linux in the desktop market, even though the market is dead in the Cloud Computing era. People are not inclined to spend money on desktop operating systems when the computing power lies in the web. Ubuntu is slowly gaining traction among the ordinary desktop users. If this trend has to consolidate, it is important that users are offered an experience similar to what they get in Windows and Mac. Right now, Adobe’s AIR is the only platform that could offer such an experience.

In my opinion, Adobe has released AIR for Linux at an opportune time both for Linux evangelists/companies and for Adobe itself. Linux evangelists and companies can project the user experience on Adobe AIR to gain traction for Linux desktops among ordinary users. Adobe can benefit by gaining a monopoly kinda advantage because they have now embraced a big segment of desktop users who had to live at the mercy of ‘volunteer’ developers in the past. Do you agree with this take or do you think that I have compromised my idea of ‘open world’ by embracing a proprietary software like Adobe AIR?

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Few people have asked me about a reliable hosted wiki platform. I thought I will put my thoughts in the form of a post in this blog. Before I discuss about hosted wiki platforms, I want to make sure that I convey my bias towards Mediawiki as the Wiki platform. In my opinion, it is the most powerful of all the wiki platforms. However, Mediawiki has a reasonably steep learning curve and I cannot recommend it to newbies. Also, Wikimedia foundation, the home of Mediawiki, doesn’t offer a hosted version of MediaWiki. Many people prefer to have a hosted version instead of going through a geeky installation process. There are many third party MediaWiki hosts but they are not from the original developers and hence people’s (especially business community’s) reluctance to go with them.

In recent times, I was playing around with many hosted Wiki sites like Wikidot, Wik.is, Pbwiki and Wikispaces. All of them have features that will help you get your Wiki running without any problems. Compared to MediaWiki, these hosted Wiki platforms are much more “user friendly”, making it a cake walk even for newbies. In fact, you can do a comparison of various Wiki platforms in the Wikimatrix website. Frequently, I come across questions about the best hosted wiki platform from my company’s clients, my friends and my social networking contacts. I often refer them to sites like Wikidot.com or Wik.is. In fact, I use Wikidot.com for a couple of projects and Wik.is for the third project. Both these Wiki platforms are extremely good and they are very user friendly, with good “mashup support”. Deki Wiki, the wiki that powers Wik.is, is very well integrated with the web services from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live. Both Wikidot.com and Wik.is can solve your Wiki needs without any difficulty for the users. My support for these two Wiki platforms doesn’t mean that Pbwiki and Wikispaces are a bad choice.

I will explain why I selected Wikidot.com and Wik.is over Pbwiki.com and Wikispaces.com here. When I consider the options for a hosted wiki, whether it is for personal purposes or business purposes, I have to take into account the long term stability of the platform. Some of the hosted Wiki sites have very good financial backing and these companies might be there for a long haul. However, this is not the case with every company that offers Wiki as the hosted platform. Sometimes, it is difficult to ascertain the stability of a company on which we are going to trust our personal or business data. There is always the danger of the hosted Wiki company shutting its doors and vanishing in thin air. How can we foolproof our personal wiki or business wiki against such eventualities? There are two ways in which we can achieve this stability. One approach is to ensure that your Wiki company offers you a way to export all your data in open formats. Now a days, many Wiki companies allow this export of data. We can then take the data to another hosted wiki company and get it imported. The second approach is to find a hosted wiki company that also offers the Wiki platform in one of the open source licenses. Suppose if the wiki company goes out of business, you will still have the application available to install in your own servers or in the computing cloud. You are completely safe even if the company that hosted your wiki is out of business. Since the wiki is released under open source license, there will still be developers working on the Wiki development. This offers you continuity with your wiki platform and your investment, both financial and time, is completely protected.

I prefer the second approach over the first and this forms the basis for my recommendation of Wikidot.com and Wik.is. You get a long term stability with your wiki platform irrespective of what happens to the company behind the wiki. I consider this to be very crucial in everyone’s wiki strategy.

Do you have a favorite hosted Wiki platform? Do you have an underlying reason to choose the platform. Feel free to share your experience here.

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I posted this comment in one of the ReadWriteWeb posts. Since the topic fits well into the theme of this blog, the concept of open web, I thought I will also post it in my blog.

The death of Readburner brings into focus a very important question. How can we rely on a web service offered by a small startups whose longevity cannot be ascertained. Readburner is a different kinda web service where we do not upload huge amounts of data. What about those two people web services where we invest our time and upload all our data? How can we rely on such companies with our valuable data? Should we wait for some big companies like Google to acquire the service before we start investing our time?

These questions bring to forefront two of the important ideas in the technology world, Open source and Data Portability. All the web services should offer a way to take your data with us using open standards. This will ensure that we will have our data in the event of a web service shutting its shop. The second important point is that these web services should consider releasing their code in one of the open source licenses. Right now, some of the web services release their code under open source licenses. For example, if wordpress.com or wikidot.com or wik.is is going to shut the shop tomorrow, nothing will happen to me except a few hours of downtime. I can take my data from these web services in an open format, use their released source code to install the software on one of my servers or somewhere in the cloud and, more importantly, my life will not get affected. How cool is that? I hope that all the mom and pop web services startups take the option of data portability seriously and consider releasing their source code to public, at least, when they shut their shop.

Technorati Tags: Dataportability, Data Portability, Opensource, Open Source, Open Standards, Readburner, Web 2.0

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If you have an Ubuntu Laptop (with bluetooth enabled), you can use any Bluetooth enabled phone to lock and unlock the software without even touching the Laptop. Blueproximity is a neat open source utility to secure Laptops running Linux. Here is a howto on setting up Blueproximity on Ubuntu.

Thanks to Lifehacker for the tip.

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I seriously don’t understand the tech journalists and bloggers. First, they don’t understand what opensource means in the first place. Second, they somehow seem to think that opensource needs Microsoft in one way or other. Opensource doesn’t need Microsoft to legitimize its existence. Opensource doesn’t need Microsoft to gain acceptance. Opensource approach and Microsoft’s proprietary approach are two different approaches to solving problems (People, try to understand diversity please). It is for the users to decide which approach suits better for them. There is absolutely no need for Microsoft to support opensource. If Microsoft wants to attach the opensource label with their company, all they have to do is to release their full software product under one of the OSI approved licenses and thatz all. Anything other than the release of their software product under one of the OSI approved licenses is just meaningless and it is not even worth talking. Fred Wilson talked about lack of standards in journabloggers. This pissed off Mike Arrington (Well, I can understand it because Fred has linked to one of the articles published in TC). Today I saw a post on Techcrunch (through techmeme discussion) titled Microsoft Sings a New Tune - Wants to play nice with open-source. This title brings into focus the standards which Fred Wilson was talking about. The TC blogger should have made some research before he came up with a title like this. It is pretty evident that he hasn’t put in any efforts to even understand the meaning of the term opensource. All Microsoft has done is to release some openAPIs and making certain documentation available to public. Knowing the secretive nature of Microsoft’s business practices, this is a Techmeme newsworthy item. I am not debating the importance of the news. But it has nothing to do with Opensource. We can quote Microsoft and Opensource in the same sentence ONLY IF Microsoft releases one of its complete products under the OSI supported licenses. As long as it doesn’t happen, using Microsoft and Opensource in the same sentence means nothing. The title, like the above Techcrunch post, is just childish and shows the author’s ignorance about the term opensource. I just hope journabloggers do take up Fred Wilson’s call and put in efforts to do some ground work before they report.

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Chronicle.com reports

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.

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There is lot of chatter going on in the tech blogosphere about the $54 million lawsuit filed against Bestbuy for losing someone’s Laptop.

Six months after bringing a damaged laptop computer into a Best Buy electronics store for repairs, and three months after the firm admitted losing it, Campbell filed the whopper of a lawsuit recently in Washington, D.C., Superior Court.

Best Buy has told Campbell that her demands are unreasonable, and has tried to settle for far less. But Campbell said she didn’t start out making astronomical demands. Months of stalling and brush-offs by the company led her to the drastic measures, she said.

I feel that Bestbuy deserves this lawsuit and I hope that the judge offers the victim the full amount (if not more). A similar thing happened to me too. When I bought a SLR camera several years back, they convinced me to get the extended warranty plan and told me that the plan also covers for cleaning. After a couple of years, I saw a spot in the mirror inside and I wanted to get it cleaned. I gave it to Bestbuy for cleaning and they promised me that it will be sent to my home within 2-3 weeks. I didn’t get it for a month and every time I went to Bestbuy, they will look into their computers and told me that it will be delivered soon. After almost 6 or 7 weeks and after ten visits to the Bestbuy, one day I lost my patience and shouted at them. Only after I drew the attention of fellow customers through my voice, they took me to someone who they told was the manager. I am pretty sure he was not the manager because he was in Geek Squad uniform and, as far as I know, the managers don’t wear Geek Squad uniform. My earlier attempts to talk to a manager didn’t work and only my shouting inside the store brought the so called “manager” out. The “manager” told me that he would offer a new camera and refused to offer me any reason for not giving back the old camera. He offered me a new camera (of the same model) which was $50 less than what I actually paid. They had the next model for the same amount I paid. He refused to give me the camera that had the same price tag as I had paid earlier and I had to shell out the difference to get the new model. He also said that I will lose my remaining one year of the extended warranty for which I paid. He told me that the warranty is for that particular piece and they cannot extend it to the new piece. When I argued that my old piece was working ok and I gave it to them only for cleaning and not repair, he refused to budge repeating the same sentences. I pointed out that his argument will hold true if I had given it for repair and they coulnd’t repair it (offered the new camera) but it will not hold true for their mistake (I am sure they have lost the camera somewhere). The arguments continued for another hour and when I started shouting again, he came around and said he will extend the warranty on the new camera for the remaining period of my original warranty. It was a frustrating but similar experience with Bestbuy. I just hope the courts will put this monster in its place and teach them an expensive lesson.

Letz not forget about Jeff Pulver’s experience in the past.

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