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.
For things that need to be internet-based and distributed, like websites and the like, the cloud stuff makes sense. Still, at that point it's not a lot more than shared scalable hosting. It's one of those things where I can turn up and down cloud things in a very small amount of time and cost versus having to procure and maintain hardware. Then I suppose there's also things like software defined networking, which makes some sense--although that's more cloud tech that will be used by providers and not just offloading crap to AWS.
I don't partake in whatever podcasts or videos or whatever, but the notion that cloud tech is some sort of secret that they are hiding is kinda asinine. If anything those companies are the big players because they are the most invested in data center space and should have the ability to be more cost competitive because they need a lot of the high dollar things like hardware and connectivity anyway for their own business uses. Anyone with the capital could turn up, and does turn up, competition to AWS. You just need some appropriate servers and some ISP circuits.
My personal "cloud isn't the future" rant though is the centralization of processing that is totally unnecessary. Things like all these "smart devices" that won't operate on their own despite the CPU functionality they need to do their job being at the level of a bottom of the barrel ARM CPU. It's one of the things you're starting to see abandoned too--like the Logitech Harmony product line. Cool stuff, but there's zero reason for a fancy infrared transmitter to need a cloud to work.