FYI: This is a rant.
This is something I've been thinking about for a few days. Every couple weeks or so on the Timcast show, Ian Crossland will sperg out and insist that sites like Facebook and Goggle and AWS should be compelled to give up the code.
This has always infuriated me. Not because I have a problem with open source (I happen to like open source), but rather because it strikes me as him, as a self proclaimed "cofounder of minds.com"... as being incredibly lazy as well as reflecting how little he actually knows about the web middleware space.
The "secret" of Facebook is 100% network effect. Any half competent app design team could hammer out Facebook's UI in a quarter, and some have. There is nothing about "the code" that is special. It's just pure network effect.
Google... once upon a time involved a bit of secret sauce in indexing, but nowadays they TOO are largely just network effect (this time from the advertisers).
But then there's AWS. That must be secret sauce in the code, right?
Well, no. And really AWS is the most interesting of the three because this is a fight that's been going on for fifty years, namely, mainframes vs boxes. It's a fight that's seen reversals of fortunes and the only certainty is that the current king will always be dethroned.
AWS doesn't do anything "new". Conceptually everything it does in hosting and running code can be traced back to products that IBM and Oracle and Unisys have been selling since the 80's (and in IBM's case, even longer). But AWS managed to strike a nerve because in the 00's the mainframes were getting pretty fucking obtuse about how difficult they were to set up and maintain.
People who think that AWS is somehow an undefeatable singularity are naive. In ten years, AWS will be what WebSphere was ten years ago, and the new hotness will be something that does everything it does but in an on-prem, physical package that can be amortized.
Why people involved him with the creation of minds I have no idea, as he has a very low resolution understanding of why Facebook is powerful and it's not because of the code, but because of their network/userbase. We could all setup a facebook clone tomorrow and you're totally right, it would serve no purpose.
As for the Cloud, it's literally both the past and the future. Whether computing is done on-premise or on someone elses super-computer is more a matter of scale of economics. Back in the day you couldn't get a good processor, so you rented the use of them remotely. Then windows popularized cheap processors, and the model moved to selling the OS directly instead of time shares for access to the OS. Whether we are doing cloud computing or on-premise computing will go back and forth constantly depending on the availability of hardware to the consumer.
That said, fuck the cloud my intent is not to rent I want to own what I value.
And the quality of the software, which was the problem in the 00's.
A LOT of innovation was happening between 2005 and 2010 with hadoop and then docker, as well as in the management space with stuff like puppet/salt/chef/ansible. People had finally started to really get into the idea of scaling by virtualization but the big players were not offering any answers on how to make it actually work end to end.