Who, Whom?

Have you ever heard the two word argument, "who, whom?" I was discussing with some family members the other day, and in my mind came the remembrance of this, "who, whom?" However, it took me a couple tries to pull this from my memory banks! I was saying things like "whom, whom," and "whom, who." After a few minutes, the meaning of the argument came back to me.

So I present that here: who, whom?

What Does This Even Mean?

I first came across this interesting concept in the writings of Friedrich A. Hayek, in his book The Road to Serfdom. Hayek devotes an entire book about the concerns of what was then calleld "central planning." It's a fascinating read, and quite intense.

Concerning the two word conundrum, Hayek writes:

I believe it was Lenin himself who introducted to Russia the famous phrase "who, whom?" --during the early years of Soviet rule the byword in which the people summed up the universal problem of a socialist society. Who plans whom, who directs and dominates whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotted by others? These become necessarily the central issue to be decided solely by the supreme power. Chapter VIII

To put more succinctly, I would summarize this as: "who decides what is best for whom?"

How Does It Apply To Web Hosting?

Without realizing it, I had had a very similar question haunt my mind one day. I was dealing with a large company who seemed quite convinced on using a prestigious cloud provider, come what may. The idea was, us cloud operations folk were to simply migrate the web app off of a certain hosting provider, and on to the cloud provider.

Since I am a server guy, I was intrigued. Something about dumping database tables and moving them somewhere else is awesome. I can't quite put my finger on it. So I was good for the gig.

However, as time progressed, I pondered on the reason why we were doing this migration. I had simply been told that moving to the cloud provider was essentially what the soon-to-be-new-owner (whoever that was going to be) would want. And that is where I began my deconstruction of reality phase :p

But in all seriousness, this "who, whom" type question began to enter my thinking. How would this particular group be so aware of what some future buyer was wanting, specifically when it comes to a cloud provider? Would the future buyer be okay with the monthly subscription fee? Would the future buyer have enough technical staff to handle the type of deployments we were using? Did we choose the right deployment, or cause things to be more complex and difficult?

It is for these reasons that I like to stick with open source software, and also standardized stuff, if I can. That way I don't have to decide what "tech debt" someone will end up, if I can avoid it. If I can deliver a system on a simple deployment, then it theoretically should be easier down the road for someone to either continue its use, or convert it into something else. Basically, I like to avoid vendor lock-in.

Guilty, Whoops

Ironically, just by virtue of me stating what I like to do because I think it will be easier for someone down the road, I am committing the same transgression as that which I am pointing out. How am I to decide what is easiest and best for a future web app owner? However, at some point there must be some reasonable explanation that reaches a mutual understanding. And that is what I hope I did with the choice of open source and standard software tools.

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