

Unlocking the cloud: Open-source software has won the argument - swombat
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13740181&source=hptextfeature&t=1

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ajm
Hopefully the "opinion leaders" that read this article will have the the nous
to pick the writer's argument apart in this very conservative article.

The point of the sub-title is made that open source software has won the
argument largely thanks to dot com boom and especially by companies like
Google. The major reason for this is the openess of the data formats in open
source software. So far, so good.

The writer then warns of the danger of data lock-in by "Cloud computing"
evidenced by the trivial example of moving you MySpace profile to FaceBook and
then making a claim moving from one service provider to another could be even
more difficult than switching between software packages.

I refute this as any/most "cloud" service providers will understand that data
ownership and availability is a key buying decision. As always, moving from
one app to another is a huge pain and has spawned an industry in itself. Data
Migration/ETL <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load>, anyone?

