Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia is warning that Software as a Service is becoming a threat to open source and that clouds could create the same vendor lock-in customers sought to avoid with open source.

Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don’t let them take the code underlying it, he wrote in a blog post. Data without software is useless.

One of the main open source concerns about SaaS in the past has been that the largest open source outfits, like Google, don’t support true copyleft through the Affero license. Google itself prefers the Apache license to anything copyleft, and this is fast becoming the norm.

Buytaert believes open source companies can disrupt this model through services like his own Drupal Gardens, which allows exporting of codes, themes, and data to any other Drupal hosting environment.

We all know about hosting, you sign up for server space, upload your files to the server, connect that with the domain name, maybe setup a database and BOOM you have a website! For years this was called hosting, most people now call it the cloud.

I had a chance to stop by Superb Internet while I was in Hawaii a few weeks back. Here is a company that has moved their Headquarters from the mainland U.S. to Honolulu, Hawaii in order to provide a better lifestyle for their employees, which in the long run translates to happier customers. 

With data centers across the United States, Superb Internet provides services to customers big and small, international and domestic.