Open-Source Developers Set Out Software Road Map for 2020
Cloud computing and Web services pose other risks, too, said the authors, among them employees of networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent, cloud-computing user (and supplier) Google, and server and software vendor Sun Microsystems.
By hiding away the software and presenting only the interface, they will limit our ability to see the source code for the applications we run. That could make some FLOSS licenses irrelevant, or their enforcement meaningless. It could also stifle innovation, if the individual programmers who code open-source applications today are reduced to mashing up future Web services through limited APIs (application programming interfaces), said the report's authors.



