The Grid and the Web - Open Standards and Open Source

Last week I was asked why open source was important to Grid. I'll admit, had to stop and think for a while.

We've all heard the reasons or ensuring interoperability and avoiding vendor lock-in, but these are benefits usually applied to open standards as opposed to open source. So I started thinking about the difference between open standards and open source, which lead me to the following phrase.

Open standards dictate what is possible today, open source is the enabler

for what is possible in the future.

I came to that phrase while drawing analogies between the Web and Grid. "The Web" and "the Grid" are similar in the sense that the terms themselves really mean nothing, they simply represent a technology. The meat behind those terms is taking action and building things with those technologies.

In the case of the Web, all web server software must implement open standards in order to play in the standard protocol environment of the Web, but they don't have to be open source. However, the most popular web server is Apache which happens to indeed be open source. In fact I suspect it is the most widely used collection of open source code in use.

I argue that the Web would not be where it is today if closed source server software was the norm. PHP, database interface plugins and maybe even Ruby on Rails (all those interesting new technologies that enable the collection of things we've taken to calling Web 2.0 possible) would not exist today if folks weren't able to get at the functional guts of the web server and make all those cool things happen behind the scenes via standard http requests.

There is still discussion regarding what Grid is and isn't, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially when open source software still makes up the majority of the driving force behind the technology.