[auganov]

We do definitely 'need' it. I think the bottleneck at the moment is technological, and slightly cultural. Basically we don't have an efficient way to run free open-source web services that could out-compete their commercial alternatives. Only in the last few years is open-source software really starting to take-off and it's mostly due to better infrastructure (technological and cultural) around open-source development rather than the actual projects themselves. My best bet is that IaaS has to become virtually free and the tools around software defined infrastructures have to get better. It's just too hard to open-source infrastructure. My second guess is huge progress in distributed de-centralized software with a 'centralized-like' functionality, but it seems at least 10 years away, the former is more likely.