David Johnson wrote: > > My point was that distribution will not become irrelevant just because > > of the Web Services hype. In the reasonably foreseeable future, > > most programs will continue to execute locally because of bandwidth > > constraints. > > It's more than bandwidth contraints. A future where all applications run on > remote servers and all the clients are thin is foreseeable, but not likely. > We had that once, back in the days when RMS decided not to place restrictions > on usage but only on distribution. We've moved beyond that. We now realize > that it is more efficient to have a thousand CPUs process a thousand > applications than to have a single centralized CPU process those same > thousand applications. > > Personally I don't think this latest big push towards thin clients is going > to be any more successful than the earlier pushes. Some of it will of course > happen, but I don't expect it to be the common mode of executing applications. > > I do foresee distributed processing. But this involves distribution, so no > problem. But centralized processing has come and gone.
>From your point of view, maybe. _I_ do have a web-service type application that I wish to release as open source, and this application will typically be used _exactly_ in the way you say that 'has come and gone'. Whether or not you feel that this is or isn't a good way to deploy applications is entirely irrelevant to me. I have an application to release; if I can't release it under an open source license because these types of apps are deemed irrelevant by the OSI then so be it. Closed source it is. I still have hopes for the amended GPL or a variant of the APSL or W3C license, though. Emile -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
