No doubt, cloud is a huge buzzword at the moment. No reason you can't use that to your advantage, however.

"Cloud computing" in common parlance means at least three things at the moment:

* A marginal-cost pricing model for compute resources (pay for only what you use)
* Making use of virtualization in one's app architecture
* Pervasive use of automation in the architecture and throughout the software lifecycle (dev/test/deploy)

#1 is a bit of a fad; some workloads can be shoved out into a public cloud with no risk to security or availability, but many workloads will never be suited for that.

However, #2 and #3 are here to stay for the next decade -- and even if computer architecture makes another massive swing (e.g. massive parallelism or quantum computing or some hooey) and virtualization is no longer as sexy as it is right now, automation always has been, and will always continue to be, a key component of successful IT operations. Automation = productivity!

Even a large part of what we call the "virtualization benefit" is actually due to automation-related productivity. The fact that I can take my pre-built OS + app stack and deploy it on whichever hardware I wish -- and in some cases even migrate it between two differently-capable host systems WHILE my guest is running! -- is all a flavor of automation. We've always been able to migrate servers, but it used to require a screwdriver and lots of patience.

So -- my advice is, don't look down your nose at the sudden cloudiness! Take advantage of this buzzword-laden atmosphere to justify your sound technical decisions to the businessfolk, in terms that their feeble minds can understand. ;-)

We're not required to have it with us while driving. If you don't have it on you the Police can demand that you take it into a Police station within 7 days though.

The quote, actually, is "information wants to be free."

There's no _should_ about it. It's not a value judgement; it's an expression of one of the natural properties of information: that it tends to replicate itself in any way it's able, subject only to the constraints of the underlying medium (and of course to any artificial constraints placed on it, though those have a track record of working badly).

Even "information wants to be free" is a bit imprecise because it anthropomorphizes the information. Data has no intent, there's no "want" there; it just seems that the natural state of information is to propagate, and to mutate as it propagate.

Also, keep in mind that "free software" doesn't necessarily mean free as in beer. If you have heard someone saying "software should be free," they may have been referring to the fact that the source code to the software that runs your life should not be a trade secret locked away in someone's corporate vault.

As numerous generations of software pirates, malware authors and hackers have shown us, to someone of sufficient skill, the machine code to a piece of software yields enough information to mutate or copy that software. Protecting source code is an attempt to create artificial scarcity -- or security through obscurity, if you prefer -- and it doesn't work very well.

Maybe my argument convinces you; maybe it doesn't. It's not really my concern. I'm employed by an open-source software company whose business is growing tremendously year-over-year -- in the middle of a recession, no less! -- and one of the main reasons for our success is that our products are _open_.

Our customers are free to inspect, modify, ask questions regarding, and contribute improvements to the tools we sell them. Because we try whenever possible to leverage open-source dev tools, we enjoy the same openness in our infrastructure and development toolset. We are able to adapt our tools to work well for us, and contribute the improvements back to the community when we're done.

"Free as in beer" is not "free as in freedom." If your industry ignores this fact, it does so at its own peril. Don't be surprised if a lightning-fast innovator comes along and disrupts everyone. And if they do, look for open source to be greasing the wheels of their productivity.

That's not actually true, Apple provide a download of Safari 4 for Snow Leopard (10.6), Leopard (10.5) and Tiger (10.4). That G5 purchased in 2006 would have shipped with 10.4, so you don't even need to have purchased any additional software in order to use the very latest version of Safari. You can download a 10.4 compatible version of Safari from here.

I really don't know where you're getting this 10.6 requirement from, because there really isn't one.

That's not the point of open source. The point is this:

- I'm an entrepreneur, or I'm being paid by an entrepreneur or a massive corporate entity, to create software that makes money.

- It is my duty as a professional to implement the most reliable, beneficial solution I can, and to do so at the lowest possible cost.

- With this goal in mind, I look around the ecosystem for existing tools, frameworks and applications that will help me achieve my goal. I will generally find any number of open-source products as well as some closed-source products.

-I choose the product (or most frequently, combination of products) that will best help me achieve my business goal. I make my choice irrespective of how the products are licensed.

And THAT, my friends, is the value proposition of open source. Day after day, software developers everywhere are awakening to the fact that the most reliable, most efficient, quickest-growing tools in the business are free of cost, community-supported, and ripe for the picking.

A very small fraction (perhaps 1%) of the people who adopt a given free software product will find that it doesn't quite suit their needs. Funded by their employer or themselves, they will tweak the product until it does what they want -- they then contributed their tweaks back to the community so others can benefit.

Can it ever be a disadvantage, being forced to contribute one's valuable IP back to the community? Of course it can! If your tweaking represents a key competitive differentiator, then by all means, buy a closed-source (or a dual-source) solution.

But, speaking as a software developer with more than a decade of experience and three patents pending, VERY FEW of the changes we make to our tools and frameworks are original or valuable in the business sense.

It is in our "business logic" where money is made -- the bits of code that sit on top of the frameworks and implement the user-relevant part of your application. And THOSE bits of the application are very seldom open source, nor should they be.