Software Pairs

In my anonymous applications post, I talked about an idea for a web service marketplace delineated by several criteria, such as cost, reliability, performance etc. Consumers could chose a service based on their particular preference, or regulatory obligation for that matter, and return to the marketplace in realtime should a chosen service provider fail to deliver the required service level, decrementing the service's reputation in the process.

Service providers would range from the high profile corporation to the reclaimed linux box powered by a solar panel in Africa (anyone can download the jdk and learn to program). Investment banks may be forced by the regulators to only source from high reputational providers in production. In dev, you can source from whoever you like.

So this service analogue applied at a macro level leads the notion of software analogues e.g Oracle and mySQL, Data Synapse and [Hadoop|ICE]. Slightly more (IB) user friendly is the notion of Software Pairs as in the stock/currency analogue of being different sectors, our delineator is Commercial vs Open Source. It mght be useful to code this up one day - a kind of del.icio.us for applications - whereby the dev community categorise which pattern is exemplified by a particular type of software.