“People will still be predicting the end of middleware ten years from now!” stated Cedric Thomas, CEO of OW2, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “The Internet has fostered the use of simple, robust protocols,” Thomas continued. “That middleware we used to know, when information systems were organized in silos is no longer center stage.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Why in your view is open source so important to the future of infrastructure?
Cedric Thomas: The infrastructure is typically what is shared by different users, different applications, different information systems, different companies. People want an infrastructure that is generic, standard, robust and scalable; an infrastructure that they can trust and that they can share. From that perspective, open source is the right model: users, and the economy in general, are much more efficient with shared open source software than with many proprietary vendors. Open source maximizes the network effects in the writing, the testing, the debugging and the support of code and delivers infrastructure software that is generally more reliable.