industry

Atlassian's acquisition of Bitbucket (shouldn't that be "bitBucket? How un-fashionable!), a hosted version control service, seems to be another step in the strategic direction shown by their launch of the Jira Studio service, which included hosted issue tracking, wiki, source code search, review, and continuous integration with Bamboo. Jira Studio already had Subversion hosting, but bitBucket offers Distributed version control, which is rapidly moving towards the mainstream.

What this looks like to me is Atlassian moving from providing tools for development teams (as opposed to tools for individual developers, such as IDEs) as essentially shrink-wrapped products, to providing them as a hosted service. Development Infrastructure as a Service (DIAAS) if you will, or better yet (more trendy!), devops as a Service (DevOpsaaS? DOaaS?)

This seems like a good position to get into as development for the cloud grows as a platform. Regardless of whether proper PaaS ever takes off (I'm sure it will, but it may take longer than we think), even teams developing for current application server platforms hosted on IaaS clouds can benefit from DevOpsaaS.

Tim O'Reilly, the boss of O'Reilly publishing and a key booster of the Web 2.0 meme, recently posted an article about operations.

One of the big ideas I have about Web 2.0 [is] that once we move to software as a service, everything we thought we knew about competitive advantage has to be rethought. Operations becomes the elephant in the room.

O'Reilly laments that most of the tools for deploying systems and applications on open source platforms (i.e. Linux) are not themselves open source. Luke Kaines and others have commented on the article with examples of open source deployment and operations management tools, including Puppet, and others I've mentioned for system configuration and network monitoring.

Lawrence Lessig declares that the two camps of the Net Neutrality debate are those who built the Net vs. those who never got it. I don't think that's accurate, the telecomms and cable networks have been a pretty key part of the Net. (Found via Rafe, btw).

I think the real division here is content providers vs. pipe owners, and the attempt to do away with network neutrality is essentially a coup attempt by the people who own the pipes.

People use the Net for the content, so that's where the value is. The pipes are just a commodity, which are expected to simply deliver the content. Selling a commodity service means competing on price, which means low margins.