Open Source Paradigm Shift(Tim O'Reilly)精読1

ITトレンド

http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource/paradigmshift_0504.html

  • パラダイムシフトという言葉の解説
  • 1981年のパラダイムシフト(IBM PC)
  • パラダイムシフトを引き起こした当事者が、その後の変化をすべて予見して正しい判断ができるとは限らないこと
  • Open Source Paridigm Shift

My premise is that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to reap the benefits. Most existing proprietary software vendors are no better off, playing by the old rules while the new rules are reshaping the industry around them.

  • 「Linuxを使っている人?、Googleを使っている人?」

Every one of them uses Google's massive complex of 100,000 Linux servers, but they were blinded to the answer by a mindset in which "the software you use" is defined as the software running on the computer in front of you. Most of the "killer apps" of the Internet, applications used by hundreds of millions of people, run on Linux or FreeBSD.

  • そして「I find it useful to see open source as an expression of three deep, long-term trends:」と言い、3つのトレンド「The commoditization of software」「Network-enabled collaboration」「Software customizability (software as a service) 」の解説に移る。ここまでがこの論文のイントロである。
  • 3つのトレンドの詳細解説(追って精読)
  • Internet Operating Systemの構築

I like to say that we're entering the stage where we are going to treat the Internet as if it were a single virtual computer. To do that, we'll need to create an Internet operating system.
The large question before us is this: What kind of operating system is it going to be?

But the lesson of open source and the Internet is that we can build an operating system that is designed from the ground up as "small pieces loosely joined", with an architecture that makes it easy for anyone to participate in building the value of the system.

  • 結論

In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. We must understand the impact of such factors as standards and their effect on commoditization, system architecture and network effects, and the development practices associated with software as a service.