Tim O’Reilly kicked off the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing this morning by talking about the need to “rediscover the values of free and open in a new context.”
He talked about a number of different freedoms, beyond the “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” dichotomy:
- Freedom to use
- Freedom to build on and adapt
- Freedom to participate
- Freedom to fork
- Freedom to switch
And then asked a series of thought-provoking questions.
How to we maintain these freedoms in a world in which “runnung the program” requires a data center? (It isn’t about programs I can run on my machine but global web services with enormous data needs)
How do we maintain these freedoms when applications are delivered as services and don’t distribute code?