Google is stepping up its open source effort big time and CNET’s Matt Asay wonders why other companies are doing the same. The key, according to Asay, is cloud computing.
“The big money is in cloud services tied to broadly adopted open-source software,” Asay wrote today.
Too many open source businesses continue, Asay said, to flounder with old business models relying on support and/or proprietary extensions.
“The big money is in cloud services,” he said, “tied to broadly adopted open-source software.”
And as for Google, Asay said that Google “may not care whether Android dominates the mobile market, but it does care that the state of the art in mobile advances so that it can benefit from those advances.”
Pushing open source software through the cloud is likely the future for Web development and software engineering. Desktop applications installed with a CD are so 2001.