Back from the Ashes: The Internet Appliance

Earlier this morning I read a terrific article from cnet’s Ina Fried about the state of the “Internet Appliance”.

Basically, the Internet Appliance rested on the idea that there were, to paraphrase Ms. Fried, many “on-ramps” to the Internet (more specifically the web). These “on-ramps” would give relatively fast, simplified access to the web in order to access information.

There’s no doubt it was a great idea, but the execution was hampered by spotty, slow, and expensive internet access and a lack of justifiable content. The result was a swift and untimely death for the entire concept.

But fast forward to today and you’ll find the Internet Appliance is alive and well. While there isn’t a single product or category that can claim the “appliance” concept outright, most of us have and use these devices everyday.

Be it an iPhone or Android, a PS3 or a Wii, all of these devices have constant access to the web to some degree.

Looking again at Ms. Fried’s article, one of the most glaring examples of an appliance’s “revival” of sorts is the concept of the “Network Computer”.

Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison dreamt up the concept of a modern mainframe computer, a “thin client” that simply accessed a core computer for its computational muscle. In the 90′s, the idea fell flat. These network computers looked and acted like standard desktops, only they were designed to be used completely differently and simply didn’t have the muscle of your standard PC.

Today? Mobile “thin client” devices are everywhere and this space is slated to get a lot more competitive with devices like the iPad and the upcoming Chrome OS.

From the standpoint of a hosting provider, the needs of web users have changed dramatically since then as well. In 1999, web pages were largely static and couldn’t break. When all you’re doing is throwing an animated “hamster” gif up with a looped audio track, well, that could very well stay up forever without a hitch.

Today, even the most basic sites require databases. Whether it’s video sharing sites, online gaming, or even a simple blog with comments, it’s hard to imagine an internet that didn’t involve real time user participation of some kind.

That got me thinking, I know how my internet creation and consumption habits have changed in the past decade, but what about everyone else’s? For those who own and operate businesses, how has your company or business adapted to the modern web? For consumers, how has your experience consuming content changed with this latest generation of internet appliances?

Let us know in the comments, on Facebook, and follow ServInt on Twitter!

Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.

Photo by Steve Rhode.

Open Source and Private Stewardship

Open Source is A Tremendous Avenue for Innovation

On September 25th, CNet’s Matt Assay wrote a terrific post on his blog The Open Road entitled “Free software is dead. Long live open source.”

The crux of the post was that the particular brand of free software or FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) that is much-lauded by software partisans like Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow is now irrelevant. Assay makes a distinction between FLOSS, meaning software that is free as in freedom and which incorporates no proprietary standards of any kind by default, and open source, meaning software that is usually free (as in beer) and that allows users to contribute to and derive from it, up to and including proprietary standards.

With open source, there is no reason to worry about standards strangling innovation because the community will simply code it’s way out of a corner. Information and software can be shared, and you can still make money.

The free software movement was born from a climate dominated by belligerent and aggressive software giants. Standards and software patents were created or acquired to hold developers hostage in exchange for exorbitant royalties.

Suing over patents became a business model in and of itself. It’s completely understandable why free software rose to prominence so quickly.

But a lot has changed in the past 15 years in the open source world. IBM, once Microsoft’s closest ally and creator of the OS/2 operating system, began an open embrace of…well…openness. Sun Microsystems open-sourced Solaris, laid the foundation for OpenOffice.org, and open-sourced Java.

Apple’s contributions to the Webkit project were immense in its adoption as the defacto mobile web browsing platform. Webkit powers MobileSafari on the iPhone and Google’s Android browser, cementing it as the platform to beat on mobile devices. On the desktop it powers Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome and is thus a key component of Google’s upcoming ChromeOS, a linux-based operating system that uses the Webkit browser as it’s main navigational tool.

The backbone of ServInt’s network was created using open source software and the vast majority of our server’s run CentOS, a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise. We have included well over 50,000 lines of unique code that has better optimized and secured our products…a task that would have been considerably more difficult in a closed development environment.

Even Microsoft has approached the open source community with a level of engagement that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago. The famously closed source company even released Windows 7 as an incredibly generous open beta for nearly two years…unheard of even in most open source circles.

The point of Assay’s article, and I suppose the point of this one, is that these projects are open, but they are all stewarded by forward thinking tech companies, organizations, and individuals who seek to make a living. Revenue and profit are not the enemy of innovation, they are the reward for innovation.

Today, the biggest competitor in the software world is not Microsoft or Adobe or Google, it’s free software. The fact that we are competing with terrific no-cost solutions has forced everyone to be more creative and take productive risks.

So allow me…’Free software is dead. Long live open source!’

I couldn’t have said it better myself.