Free software vs. software-as-a-service: Is the GPL too weak for the Web?

People have been running various services for profit for years using GPL and other FOSS applications, with email, Web hosting, and name services being the big three. The good hosting services do all kinds of custom scripting and coding, and this never sees the light of day, but stays in-house. I know I'd love to get my hands on some of the custom scripts the big hosts use to manage hundreds of nodes in their datacenters and thousands of customers, but they're not sharing.

So why the cries of alarm now? Web 2.0 and SAAS and all those buzzwords are just natural progressions of something that's been done for years. It didn't bother anyone when it was called BIND, Apache, PHP, Sendmail, Postfix, and so forth.

> So why the cries of alarm now?

Envy.

Quoting:The good hosting services do all kinds of custom scripting and coding, and this never sees the light of day, but stays in-house. I know I'd love to get my hands on some of the custom scripts the big hosts use to manage hundreds of nodes in their datacenters and thousands of customers, but they're not sharing.

Start an open source project about it. IMHO these kinds of "stacks" are exactly what FOSS needs next. Not so much a new distro, but a package for your favourite distro that depends on all the goodies needed, adds the integration bits and configures the stuff out-of-the-box in a post-install script.

Just look at Trac for example. A fine example of integration between Subversion, Bugzilla, a wiki and a mailinglist.

Quoting: Start an open source project about it. IMHO these kinds of "stacks" are exactly what FOSS needs next.

Hmmm. A splendid notion- I shall seriously ponder it. It's crazy to spend wads of money on overpriced, sort-of helpful commercial network management tools when a bit of smart scripting gets you there better and cheaper.