If Tim O'Reilly's comments in a recent podcast are on the mark, the future of software won't be open or proprietary, or even revolve around software at all. It'll be about open, user-aggregated data, and how we get there will become increasingly unimportant.

That's the theory, anyway, and I'm perennially skeptical of advance theory (the web browser will replace standalone applications; you don't need a desktop computer anymore; etc.) until it's actually been substantiated by real-world action. In the podcast, though, Tim points out that the real value of things is not in the algorithms or the logic, but the data:

[Proprietary software vendors] probably will make their software open source because it won't matter. The value lies in having the data. The real question is, will there be a future open-source movement that's really an open-data movement.

A while back I mused about something that worked in exactly that vein: an open-source machine translation system where the software itself and all of its algorithms were totally free for use. What was for-pay were the dictionaries, the parallel texts -- the data -- that made the program truly useful. Without that all-important puzzle piece, the software had little to no value.

This approach may only work for software where the real value is added in the form of data, but Tim's point is that more and more software is becoming like this. A word processor isn't much use without a good grammar and spell checker. Those are things that require bodies of data, tediously assembled and vetted by human beings, to be useful.

Is it all going to end up like this, though? Or at least enough of it that, as Tim hinted, it won't matter? And what happens when people demand the data be free as well, or make competing free-data repositories? It might not be too early to start worrying about these things.

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