Mike Linksvayer at Creative Commons reports on a controversial discussion regarding open standards in “cloud computing.” It started with Sun Microsystems CEO announcing that all API’s for their software would be released under a Creative Commons license. Next, Steve Martin at Microsoft reported that a cloud computing manifesto is being developed in secret, without public comment. Martin called on the unknown authors to develop the manifesto in the open, using a wiki with a Creative Commons license. From Martin’s blog post:
Cloud computing is an exciting, important, but still nascent marketplace. It will, we expect, be driven in beneficial ways by a lot of innovation that we’re dreaming up today. Innovation lowers costs and increases utility, but it needs freedom to develop. Freezing the state of cloud computing at any time and (especially now) before it has significant industry and customer experience across a wide range of technologies would severely hamper that innovation. At the same time, we strongly believe that interoperability (achieved in many different ways) and consensus-based standards will be valuable in allowing the market to develop in an open, dynamic way in response to different customer needs.
