[ajm]

Hopefully the "opinion leaders" that read this article will have the the nous to pick the writer's argument apart in this very conservative article.

The point of the sub-title is made that open source software has won the argument largely thanks to dot com boom and especially by companies like Google. The major reason for this is the openess of the data formats in open source software. So far, so good.

The writer then warns of the danger of data lock-in by "Cloud computing" evidenced by the trivial example of moving you MySpace profile to FaceBook and then making a claim moving from one service provider to another could be even more difficult than switching between software packages.

I refute this as any/most "cloud" service providers will understand that data ownership and availability is a key buying decision. As always, moving from one app to another is a huge pain and has spawned an industry in itself. Data Migration/ETL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load, anyone?