Occasionally into any technology writer's life, a little rain must fall.

Sometimes of course it's not so much a little rain as a full-blown typhoon, such as when free and open source software (also known as FOSS for short) blows in as a development methodology.

Phrases like "all bets are off" come immediately to mind. We should all have guessed that it was going to mean stormy weather ahead when it took open source activist Bruce Perens numerous e-mails with his peers back in June 1997 to compile what was initially called "The Debian Free Software Guidelines" (referring to Debian, a distribution of Linux), but which eventually became shorn of Debian-specific references to become the "Open Source Definition" (www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.php).

While we're on the subject of Linux distros, Red Hat founder Bob Young is a one-man hurricane. When he blew into an open source and free software conference held at the University of Toronto in May, he was scathing about the business model that fails to charge for software: "Good businesses will deliver more value to society than any nonprofit will," he gushed. "The profit motivation is actually a very good one; it makes sure we're delivering real value to our customers."

Contrast this with Professor Eben Moglen's comments at the same conference, during a panel discussion called "Free and Open Source Software as a Social Movement," and you begin to realize why the i-technology weather is so stormy, on a seemingly permanent basis. Everyone wants to be in charge!

"Whoever controls software, controls life," said Moglen, who is also legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation. He added: "Well, it had better be us. That's the real political meaning of the free software movement. Civil freedom in the 21st century requires human beings to retain control over the technological environment that surrounds them."

The subtext of the three-day event - as with any technology conference but most especially those concerning Internet technologies - was the future. The future of the future, if you will. Of the IT future, anyway.

This is the one thing that unites every faction of the technology space: wanting to second-guess the shape of things to come. That's what everyone wants to know, in the hope perhaps of avoiding another dot-com boom-bust cycle. But that is the only thing that unites technologists of every stripe; once it comes to describing that shape, defining it and unpacking it so that IT organizations can prepare for it and move toward it, the tech community becomes a sometimes bewildering place, buffeted by winds from every direction.

Perhaps the answer lies in "The Grid" - that seems to be the hope anyway of Sun's Greg Papadopoulos, recently named as one of the 25 top CTOs of 2004, quite specifically for having taken the IT industry "one step closer to grid computing." Papadopoulos, a 20-year industry veteran and former MIT computer science professor, defines grid computing as "the decoupling of applications from specific hardware platforms." After this will come the virtualization of those platforms, Papadopoulos believes. This would allow IT organizations to create a network-based "computing and storage pool," and be a lot more dynamic in associating the computation they perform with the resources they have available.

If not grid computing, perhaps it is "utility computing" that will change everything. Embracing a shift from traditional infrastructure to utility computing, the IT gurus insist, "requires changes across three dimensions: people, processes, and technology." Certainly that is going to slow it down a tad, but you can see their point: a strong technical solution and architecture won't ever succeed without "buy-in" from application teams and sponsors for the changes in process. Any shift, whether it be to grid computing, utility computing, autonomic computing, or the Next Big Thing, requires a solid plan and organizational structure, otherwise neither application teams nor IT sponsors will benefit from reduced costs, faster time-to-market, or any of the other perquisites that accrue from a shared infrastructure.