[hvidgaard]

You just touched upon one of my idealistic geek wet dreams: Truly decentralized applications. Let's use ondemand music streaming as an example. I dream of a network where I pay whatever vendor I want, to deliver streams of music. I also pay whatever vendor I want to save my data (think playlists and play data). And I pay whatever vendor I want (could be free software as well) to play those streams. Each component does one thing, and the communication between is documented and open sourced. If I decide to switch player, that is fine, perhaps I use a different player on my phone and on my rpi terminal. If decide to switch stream provider my data is not locked with the previous vendor.

[scalio]

That's some idyllic thinking, but I agree such interoperability would be awesome. However, I don't see how it could be realized with current closed ecosystems. Seems like this would almost require open software...

[phn]

I wouldn't say open source. But well-defined inter-operation protocols and strong encryption, yep.

[roflchoppa]

The pipe command for services. I can dig that.