[okfn-discuss] Taking the Open Service Definition to 1.0

Wed Jul 23 11:26:22 UTC 2008

Rufus Pollock wrote:
> On 14/07/08 16:56, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>   
>> Well, I guess it is too late, but I don't get "software service".
>> John Bywater wrote a few days ago 'Yet overall, I do feel the name
>> "software service" is much more common than "network service", and as
>> such a much better thing to conjoin with "open" and "definition".'
>>
>> Not if you check authoritative sources, like Google and Wikipedia. :)
>>     
>
> You should have spoken up earlier -- though the danger would be we would 
> have never reached agreement :)

Been away for a few days, but just to josh along with this a bit 
further, I wonder whether the concern Mike raises is a good one....

I assume: what is common is what is good; we're looking for a good name. :-)

So it's true, neither Wikipedia nor Google have a definition of 
"software service", which indicates fairly authoritatively the term 
isn't an official name. But that says nothing of how common it is. :-)

Without thinking about it much, the count of Google search results seems 
to be a measure of the circulation of a term, in other words how common 
it is. I didn't look before, but it turns out the word phrase "software 
service" has 32% more results on Google than "network service" (5.3m and 
4m respectively) [1] [2].

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=%22software+service%22
[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=%22network+service%22

At the same time, as Rufus has heard (mentioned by him below), Wikipedia 
definitively indicates that a network service is basically something 
your ISP provides [3] in other words bandwidth and network access, and 
not really anything to do with the application layer at all.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_service_provider

For me, the best argument for OSD => OSSD would follow from the 
authoritative observation of Grady Booch that the history of software is 
increasing layers of abstraction. In this case, it is the service level 
which abstracts pure software functionality from the software system and 
its ever-attendant development/deployment/maintenance/migration process. 
But that has raised new concerns about access and ownership. Such 
concerns are addressed by this defintion, which is it's entire purpose. 
Injecting 'S-for-service' into the F/O-S-D name stack supports such a 
meaning, as Masayuki Hatta articulated well under the notion of 
continuity in his last post to this list.

>  Perhaps this is something we can keep 
> open for the v1.1 (or v2.0) which will undoubtedly be necessary as more 
> precise use-cases (and edge-cases) come in over time.
>   

Perhaps it would be useful to clarify in the definition somewhere that 
the name "Open Software Service Definition" can be read as:

"Open Software [as a] Service Definition"

OR

"Open Software [Application] Service Definition" ?

Incidentally, was there ever an "Open Application Service Definition" 
option in this discussion? The term Application goes back to the 
standard reference model. But still, despite being u:ber-official, it 
might not be so common anymore....

> It does seem that none of the suggested names were perfect (for example 
> several people I've mentioned Open Network Services too think their 
> about rules for ISPs).
>   

Indeed.

J.

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