Shoulders and Giants and Open Souce

One of the great things of Open Source is that you do not have to start from scratch.  You can start with other open source.  The problem with other open source is license campatibility.  I am a programmer not a lawyer so how do I achieve my goals without running into license hell.

Cloud Wizard is going to be based on other Open Source.  I decided on the New BSD license because it is very liberal.  I think the GPL's come with lectures and legal viruses.  Other people may like that but I do not consider it Free Open Source Software if it comes legal obligations.

All the package dependencies for CW will be BSD, MIT, Apache or some other really open license.  If I really have to, I will include LGPL.  All the dependencies will have to use easy_install to make it simple.  

I am working toward a PYPI release by Dec 1.

To Open Source or not to Open Source

I was plugging away on an  idea for a cloud control panel.  It would be easy to use and inexpensive with some cool new features.  Eventually it would handle multiple clouds but initially I was working on Amazon.  

One of key features was a easy to use scripting language.  I based the language on python.  If I hid the imports, no python knowledge would be necessary.  After I got it working, I had a tragic realization.  I made it too easy.  I had created a cross cloud scripting system that any decent python programmer could reproduce.  The hard part was the analysis which I had done.

I might as well make it open source so other people could add more clouds to it.  As soon as I get my Amazon ids out of all the code, I will be releasing it under the new BSD license.  

Google App Engine is the Saw Mill of the Internet

I have been reading a lot about Google App Engine. I even got one of the precious 10K initial accounts.

Many of the complaints are about the limitations. That is completely the wrong way to look at it. Amazon Web Services provides tools to create flexible tools to create Internet Services. They are pretty easy to use so lets think of them as a Black and Decker power tool set. With a bit of work, you can cut boards and build a house.

Google App Engine is a Saw Mill. Great for wiping out entire forests of trees. If you want to hang a picture, you are doomed. It is not for creating blogs although this blog might be hosted on it. It is for creating a service to host millions of blogs.

They gave enough free resources to host 5M page views per month. That is probably because 5M page views is beneath their notice and a rounding error.

I can understand the concerns about Google lock-in, etc. That is fine if you have a smaller problem. However, if you need Big Table and Google scale, you would be a fool to write it yourself. Google has spent billions and man centuries of PHD time optimizing the life out of it. They have not announced pricing but I have a hard time believing that it will be more expensive than Amazon or any other ISP for forest clearing.

GAE will not be a competitor for most ISPs just like saw mills didn't put Black and Decker out of business. It will accelerate the develop of Internet Scale businesses. Things that just required too much VC money before.