Open Source and free data

Two articles that are just wonderfully expansive...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070503/012939.shtml

http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/30283

I came across these articles researching and thinking about SaaS and PaaS and what would be the best road forward for startups in that space. Salesforce may have blazed the trail but SugarCRM is doing most of what I am doing with Salesforce. Hosting SugarCRM on demand on Amazon would save me money over Salesforce. However, in the end it is not the SaaS CRM system that is the value, it is the data inside it and my internal business process surrounding that CRM data. I want the flexibility to take this data and process anywhere so that I can take advantage of available skill or innovation and extract more value out of the accumulated data.

Cloud computing exposes this fundamental problem of data movement. This problem was not perceived as a problem as much for on-premise applications due to the false impression that local data is always usable. To make cloud services ubiquitous this problem of data movement needs to get solved and robust, free Open Source components will be developed to solve this problem since users will demand it.