We’re going to have people discussing all this and more on Wednesday and Thursday at this week’s Structure conference in San Francisco. In the sixth year of the event we’re spending a lot of our time delving into the practical matters of building out webscale infrastructure, from the networking conundrums to the business process around scaling.

If there’s one big theme for the show this year, it’s what happens when IT meets the business and how to bring an understanding of business goals to scaling out services, whether you are Amazon or Revlon. We’ll have Kevin Scott of LinkedIn sharing how he re-architected the business social network’s infrastructure to better meet business goals. Cory von Wallenstein of Dyn will discuss the process the company follows to support existing features while building new ones that must scale rapidly without breaking the service or the bank.

We’ll also have executives from Warner Music Group sharing how the company is building out an internal platform as a service and what it will do for the business, while CIOs from Revlon, Kohl’s and The Clorox Company share their takes on the cloud from inside the enterprise.

Networking nerds from web giants will be there discussing the importance of using software defined networks and real-time information for building application aware networks. Plus, we have several talks from people such as Jeff Dean of Google, Jason Hoffman of Joyent and Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix  that will discuss how to push our infrastructure’s boundaries for the data-rich era we’re entering.

We’ll also have ten three-minute talks from our Cloud Trailblazers who will be there ready to talk about their ideas for how to rethink infrastructure. You can meet the stars of tomorrow over the course of the two-day event. Or you can network with the stars of today. Plus, two hot startups will debut and there’s also a six-company LaunchPad with very young startups.

I’m preparing to get on a plane from Austin to spend this week in San Francisco. I’ve made this trip dozens of times for dozens of GigaOM events, but this one has me the most excited. We’ve pulled some amazing people together to talk not just about defining the cloud or various trends in infrastructure, but how the shift in information technology is playing out at real companies whether they are startups, enterprises or the giants of the webscale world.

We have a few tickets left, so just sign up and get on over to the event. This isn’t some wannabe cloud show. This is Structure, the first and the best cloud show planned by myself, Derrick Harris, Barb Darrow and the GigaOM events team. We wouldn’t let you down.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem

Expect more pledges of support to come out of Opscode’s annual conference kicking off tomorrow in San Francisco. Tools like Chef and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. One key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud. At least in theory.

In Opscode parlance, Chef configurations are deployed and managed via a “cookbook.” Joyent’s support of Chef means it will be easier, going forward, for customer to move cloud deployments to and from any cloud, said Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman in a recent interview.

“Chef, rather than the bare APIs, thus becomes the abstraction layer,” Hoffman told me. “By supporting Chef we make workloads more mobile. If Amazon calls an instance M1 why don’t we have one?” If that nomenclature is standard across clouds, the various scripts will work more easily anywhere.

That means, in Hoffman’s view, that folks who’ve deployed workloads in AWS, but want better and more explicit service level agreements or other contractual terms that AWS may not grant, can move the whole kit-and-kaboodle over to Joyent or, truth be told, vice versa.

As to why Chef appears to be gaining so much traction over CF Engine and Puppet? Hoffman thinks it’s because Opscode is more aligned with developers whereas Puppet targets admins, or the “ops” constituency of devops. In January, Puppet received an additional $30 million investment from VMware, funding which leads some to see Puppet falling into the VMware camp — a contention that Puppet CEO Luke Kanies denied at the time of the deal, pledging to continue support for heterogeneous hypervisors and environments.

Joyent, along with the various OpenStack-allied vendors, is hoping to take business from Amazon which, to be fair, isn’t taking that potential threat lying down — AWS has been adding more enterprise-friendly features and services recently. Later on Wednesday, we’ll hear about how the EMC and VMware-backed Pivotal Initiative plan to take on AWS and other cloud competitors. And, to further muddy the waters, VMware said on its earnings call Tuesday night that it will launch its public-cloud take, which it calles VMware Hybrid Cloud Service on May 21. We’re going to need a score card.

No doubt we’ll hear more about Hoffman’s vision of mobile cloud workloads and the increasingly competitive cloudscapewhen he takes the stage at Structure 2013 in San Francisco on June 19

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

Offering a Hadoop service is pretty much part and parcel of being a cloud provider at this point. By rolling out its own offering, Joyent joins the ranks of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, GoGrid, IBM and, soon enough, Rackspace. Joyent’s Hadoop service is based on the Hortonworks Data Platform (as are the Microsoft and Rackspace offerings) and — according to Joyent — runs three times faster than some other cloud-based Hadoop services.

Jason Hoffman at Structure Europe 2012 (Credit: JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY http://www.juliadeboer.com)

This is so, according to Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman, in part because Joyent’s cloud architecture is highly persistent (i.e., storage and compute are co-located and non-ephemeral), which means Joyent can bring the MapReduce processors to the data. In other cloud environments, data — potentially lots of it in the case of Hadoop jobs — might have to traverse a network in order to reach the Hadoop processors, running into variable performance and issues along the way.

However, while Joyent’s high-performance architecture certainly attracts a higher class of customer (Telefonica is among its early Hadoop users and Hoffman said deployments well into the hundreds of nodes aren’t uncommon), Hoffman said the accompanying higher price means Joyent misses out on a lot of the individual and startup users that have helped drive AWS’s popularity.

AWS, for what it’s worth, might take issue with this classification. Its significant lead in the number of users on its cloud platform isn’t attributable entirely to low costs and spendthrift startups. Netflix is one notable user, and the company claims a large number of enterprise users for both its computing and big-data-focused services.

Still, there’s plenty of business in Joyent’s high-end world. Hoffman said the company’s private-cloud software business is doing very well and the Hadoop offering will ship as software, too. Customers that have servers in data centers where Joyent also has locations, such as the SuperNAP facility in Las Vegas, can deploy hybrid Hadoop environments without having to worry about data ever having to travel across the internet or even a dedicated cross-country connection.

Joyent’s Haddop architecture

But Joyent does see a lot of opportunity to win a broader range of customers now that it’s officially in the big data space. Hadoop is just the starting point, Hoffman said, and the company will release more offerings to support transactional workloads, real-time processing and other things that Hadoop is not presently designed to do. New technologies mean new options for customers — Telefonica, for example, is trying to productize its own mountains of data and sell it as a service to retailers (something Sprint is trying to do, as well).

“I wholeheartedly believe it’s going to be those types of unique usages with data that will drive enterprise adoption,” Hoffman said. “The whole point of computers is to do things with data.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• 9 Companies that Pushed the Infrastructure Discussion in 2010
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

For all the talk of Amazon’s dominance in public cloud, we’re still very early on in this game. Outside of web startups and SaaS companies, many businesses have barely dipped their toe in the cloud to date. That means there is big opportunity for those vendors that can provide an enterprise-class cloud. At the very least, Amazon’s miscues have definitely prompted these companies to think of using multiple clouds and/or evaluate private vs. public cloud where they feel they have more control. So the other cloud players have to play up their strengths either as a replacement or an adjunct to AWS.

Differentiate your cloud from the rest

Not surprisingly, Rackspace is turning up the volume on its “fanatical support” pledge to woo business users who really really want a phone number to call and a hand to hold during cloud deployment — and as needed thereafter. Many customers also like that Rackspace lets them mix workloads between private and public clouds. That private-public-cloud mix is one advantage HP, Softlayer, Joyent and others can offer over AWS. To be fair, Amazon has not stood still here. It’s pushing its own Virtual Private Cloud, that lets users cordon off a chunk of AWS infrastructure for their own use. It has also struck an alliance with Eucalyptus to ease hybrid cloud deployments between AWS and Eucalyptus-based clouds.

Bestfit Mobile has moved some workloads from Amazon to Rackspace because it hit scaling problems with Amazon’s load balancing, said Ray Williamson, VP of software for Bestfit. Rolling out a mobile app for a big retail customer, Bestfit initially launched all the data on Amazon but ran into scaling issues with its load balancer. “Amazon uses a software load balancer — cloud is great for many things but sometimes you need real hardware.” Williamson said.

Sometimes the best cloud is a mixed cloud

Bestfit ended up deploying a mixture of on-premises hardware load balancers and cloud-based infrastructure linked by a fast Rackspace Connect connection without huge additional cost.

But support was also a huge differentiator. “With Amazon it’s hard to get an engineer on the phone. With Rackspace, we get help. We call, they call back and the Rackspace guys can log in and fix the problem if needed. AWS cannot log into your machine by policy,” he said.

San Francisco-based Joyent has some high-profile customers like LinkedIn but remains something of a stealth player — albeit one with a solid reputation if you drill down. It, like Softlayer, has made noises in the past about taking on Amazon, but has not been blatant in doing so. Still, Hoffman’s  not shy about saying that AWS US-East outages are not flukes. Instead, he said they result from underlying architectural issues with how its control plane is set up that make some services, notably Elastic Load Balancer, vulnerable, in his view.

“For some of these services one failure leads to another to another and the whole thing has to be rebooted to fix. Theser are not ‘oh gosh, oh golly gee, something happened’ but things that will keep on happening and it’s why they keep happening, “Hoffman said.

Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman said the company sees lots of prospects that are AWS users. “Do we sit down and go after [AWS] in our materials? No. But we do talk about our availability from an uptime perspective and in aggregate we do less than 10 seconds of downtime per year. So from an availability standpoint we do very well and our conversations with customers touch on that.”

Joyent, Softlayer, Neogrid, OpSource and NephoCloud are what David Linthicum, founder of Blue Mountain Labs and a GigaOM Pro analyst characterizes as ”found clouds.”

“They are typically not on the A list, but are found through evaluation and analysis.   I put them on the radar for my clients, but I always get a ‘who?’”

Beware of AWS bashing

It’s probably smart not to be too blatantly opportunistic in bashing Amazon. “Most cloud providers suffer outages from time-to-time, AWS is just more scrutinized than the rest since they are the leader,” Linthicum cautioned. Any cloud company could blast AWS this week and have an outage tomorrow. “However, they certainly can provide up-time statistics that compare their services with those of AWS, and other players. That’s both fair, and productive.”

 Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Editor B

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Federated clouds: for when one cloud isn’t good enough
• Infrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight

Wasik most recently served as the president and CEO of Force10 Networks, which he sold to Dell at a 50 percent premium to the projected IPO range just prior to launching the road show, according to the Joyent release. Prior to Force10, Wasik held roles at Alcatel and DSC Communications. With a new CEO in place and the upgrade to its platform, Joyent is setting itself up for a big play in the infrastructure market in the months ahead, according to Hoffman.

The new management software, while not sexy, gives Joyent the base of tools to create a cloud offering that can span multiple data centers, even those not operated by Joyent. Joyent customers such as Telefonica are offering end-users infrastructure as a service built on their own servers and in their own data centers that run Joyent7. In some cases, the Joyent customer buys the machines and in others Joyent will set up machines that run the Joyent software for the customer.

The end result is that a customer of Telefonica, for example, can now elect to run their applications in Telefonica data centers or in those belonging to Joyent (or any other Joyent7 customer who opens up their infrastructure as a service.) This creates the equivalent of Amazon’s Availability Zones for customers, only one provider doesn’t have to own all the data centers. Clearly, this only has value if Joyent has enough customers of the software or its services who want to join in this global cloud roaming arrangement, but Hoffman is confident that there are enough to provide value to end users already.

Telefonica announced its deployment earlier this week and is one of several service providers customers that Joyent has. Joyent competes against other IaaS providers such as Amazon’s Web Services, but is building a fundamentally different architecture aimed at serving the compute and economic needs of cloud and webscale customers. If you want to see the vision in detail, just watch Hoffman’s video from our Structure:Europe event in October.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

In 2005, Hoffman’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. His grandmother had died of the same disease . His mom thought it was a death sentence. Hoffman, then working as a doctor, reoriented his life to help her fight the disease. But instead of drawing on his medical training, he tapped his interest in computing — specifically the small hosting company he had started as a side project to help some of his friends build out new web services such as WordPress (see disclosure) or 37 Signals.

He quit his day job as a cancer pathologist, moved from San Diego to San Francisco, and spent the next 18 months working with his mom’s treatment team to develop a custom-drug program.

Her treatment was “unorthodox” because it combined research on specific cancers with genetic analysis on his mom. That genetic analysis required a lot of computing power optimized for visualizing data — power that Hoffman supplied with his hosting company, Joyent.

For the first time since he was about 16, Hoffman was focused on one job — building Joyent — instead of two or three. That, and saving his marriage and his mom’s life. Despite long odds, his mom survived. His marriage didn’t.

Jason Hoffman racking servers.

As for Joyent, once Hoffman turned his full attention to the company, he decided it had to be bigger than hosting a few blogs or helping a dozen entrepreneurs. “If this is what I’m going to do … It needs to be more of a change-the-world type of thing. The plan became how could someone build a modern systems company and deliver it as a service?” Systems, as in giant clusters of servers that deliver all those games and crunch genomics data all at the same time.

Our raging addiction to the Internet and the demand for computing everywhere we go is forcing a kind of reckoning in the IT space. Much like widespread automobile adoption forced a rethink of the transportation system, our dependence on the internet is forcing us to rethink the way we build computers.

The next generation of cloud computing and data processing infrastructure will need to have flexible pools of storage available near powerful processors with a superfast and flexible network bridging the two. It’s massively distributed and looks more like a supercomputer than a rack of servers topped by a switch. Google knows it. Intel knows it. VMware knows it. And before these companies knew it, Jason Hoffman knew it.

From Army brat to lab rat

Hoffman was born in Long Beach Calf., where his father brought the family after a tour in Vietnam. His father, a soldier, worked as an honor guard burying the dead coming back from the war, and his mother was a nurse. His family moved to Germany when he was six months old. And for the next decade, Hoffman started each year in a new school in a different place in the world, as an army brat.

Despite his itinerant lifestyle, Hoffman did well in school, something he attributes to his voracious reading. During sixth grade, he read about two books a day and wrote them up as book reports, earning the ire of his classmates. Hoffman can still rankle others in the industry — in part because he is incredibly smart and not shy about sharing his opinions or rationalizations.

Earlier this year, Joyent decided to shut down a service called TextDrive, despite having promised early TextDrive users that they would have lifetime accounts. Hoffman, a co-founder of TextDrive, which was then purchased by Joyent, took the vitriol of the angry users calmly, broadcasting snippets of the hate mail he received in a series of tweets. Hoffman later worked with TextDrive co-founder Dean Allen to address those concerns.

“Jason is not a victim,” says Dr. Elie S. Semaan, his former college roommate and now a surgeon at New York Methodist Hospital. “Even when he hits these low points you won’t see him thinking about how bad it is. He just keeps moving forward.”

Hoffman hugging his servers.

It’s just with corporate strategy that he can be dispassionate. At one point during our interview, for example, he described his mom’s cancer diagnoses as “problematic.” Rather than talk about what she means to him or how he felt at the prospect of losing her, he went straight to how he solved the problem.

Reading between the lines as Hoffman talks, he seems to feel that emotions can be an impediment because they can get in the way of clear-eyed solutions. He mentions, for example, the time he spent working in the ER during high school and college.

“It was a nice little crucible to go through. The hospital was in an area where a lot of gangs were, and it was war zone-ish.” Hoffman said. “It wasn’t unusual to see a shooting and two stabbings a night. When you see that, and you’re 18 through 22, you begin to see what is actually an emergency and what is really something tragic. You also see how a team works and learn how to work under pressure.”

Despite not wearing his emotions on his sleeve, Hoffman is a good friend to many in the industry. At home, he spends as many weekends as possible with his three daughters (one with his first wife and two with his second). On Hoffman’s birthday earlier this year, his wife and youngest daughter came to see him backstage at an industry conference bearing donuts, and despite the danger of a sticky suit before he was set to go on stage, he held his donut-eating daughter in his lap.

Yet, even here he is supremely rational. Knowing that work and family are the two most important things in his life, he’s set up a system that supports both. He says he lives equidistant between his office and the airport so he can get home as quickly as possible from work or a trip.

Computing and cancer aren’t too far apart

Hoffman’s beginnings in medicine primed him to rethink computing. From early in his career as a cancer researcher, Hofmann was playing with computers. First it was giant SGI machines to help handle large data sets and images, but later it became Linux boxes and even mini supercomputers he built himself. Some of his initial research involved looking at people with cervical, breast and certain types of skin cancer and understanding genetic markers that predisposed them to these diseases. But the imagery and data sets taxed his machines.

“The problem with computers is that they are built for doing math, but doing math is different than looking at images and moving bits and storing things, so I had general frustrations around storage,” Hoffman said.

With Joyent, he saw the opportunity to fill that void– and provide exactly the type of computing we’re seeing with the rise of online video and picture-based services like Pinterest and big data. And he thought about ways to do it on the cheap to support those burgeoning online businesses.

Hoffman’s drawings on how to scale out WordPress’ infrastructure.

Joyent has raised $150 million, and landed dozens of mobile and ecommerce customers including ModCloth, GiltGroupe, LinkedIn, Digital Chocolate, Adobe and Voxer. Commercial success is good, but with a $150 million investment, the question for Hoffman is whether the company will go public or sell.

On the technical side, Joyent’s goals are much clearer. Hoffman says he will soon be able to deliver an exabyte of storage — that’s the equivalent of 250 million high-def movies — with only 10 megawatts of power and $2 million. That’s a big brag, since the traditional thinking is that delivering an exabyte of storage would take around $200 million.

For all its success, though, it’s still unclear whether Joyent will become the next big thing, or a Sun Microsystems– that is, home to brilliant technology that is unable to dominate the market. Joyent’s business of selling a private cloud based on a fundamentally different compute architecture means it uses a different operating system to deliver the best performance over a massively distributed system.

Giant companies generally don’t want to adopt new OSes, and while Joyent offers hardware to service providers in on-premise boxes so customers can choose their provider, its other big problem is the competition. The company is basically trying to carve out a place as the infrastructure equivalent of an Aston Martin to Amazon’s Toyota. And it’s hard to fight against the commodity pricing that Amazon can offer.

Hoffman sees this as his chance to make a mark on the compute world, and he’s pushing forward. And perhaps that’s his style — pursuit of a lofty intellectual goal and little tolerance for any drama that might slow the ship down. It looks like arrogance, but if he winds up developing tomorrow’s distributed compute architecture, no one will care.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

The second coming of TextDrive is courtesy of Dean Allen, a co-founder of the service who left in 2007 roughly two years after it was acquired by Joyent. His other TextDrive co-founder Jason Hoffman is a co-founder and CTO of Joyent. Allen told me that after Joyent purchased TextDrive he knew that the lifetime memberships that users purchased in order to help fund the growth of the business, were likely doomed, but when the time came to kill them he wanted to step back up and create a hosting company that could still honor them.

“I knew fully well at the time [Joyent bought TextDrive] that one day it wouldn’t be possible to support lifetime subscriptions anymore, and I knew when the day came that it was no longer possible I would step back in and take care of those people.”

So when he saw Joyent email saying those accounts would be suspended, he said, “I think I kicked the cat and sweared a lot. And then I called Jason [Hoffman].” Allen flew over from France, where he lives, and spent the last few days working out the details of how Joyent would migrate the TextDrive customers on the older infrastructure over to the new TextDrive. Those customers will still be hosted on Joyent’s servers, but on the more modern infrastructure, and will no longer be direct customers of Joyent.

Allen plans to continue running TextDrive as a business, and the affected customers will transition over to TextDrive by Nov. 1 with minimal effort from then. Behind the scenes, however Joyent engineers and Allan are working hard to ensure the thousands of users are ported over to the appropriate hosting infrastructure.

“The thing we can attribute to Joyent is that they were creative and worked with us in finding a solution that gives people what they had,” Allen said. And perhaps we can also learn that sometimes, people do honor their word.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

(L to R) Dave Rosenberg, CEO, Nodeable; Jason Hoffman, Founder and CTO, Joyent
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Node.js, the event-driven programming language that is the darling of the real-time web world, is many things: but it’s not a good business, nor is it applicable for all use cases, according to two panelists speaking in San Francisco at Structure 2012. During a chat Jason Hoffman, the CTO of Joyent, which is the company that created Node.js, and Dave Rosenberg of Nodeable explained the genesis and use cases for Node.js.

Node.js was created to be efficient from an infrastructure perspective and it also has a Javascript component. But Rosenberg cautioned at several points during the panel that it wasn’t the end-all be all, “Don’t boil the ocean,” he said. Node.js is ideal for server-side app development. As for those who want to complain, Hoffman said that those people should try to work within the community to improve Node. However he said that while Joyent created it, running business that supports a compiler or run time isn’t a great business.

And finally I learned that Node.js may have a bright future beyond the web inside embedded devices and on mobile phones. Hoffman said that the framework had a home on Palm’s webOS and Emerson is interested in using it in thermostats. For the deep dive, check out the video below.

Also check out the rest of our Structure 2012 coverage, including the live stream, here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Microsoft Azure: What It Is, What It Costs and Who Should Care
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012

“It’s all just so dumb,” said Hoffman, CTO and founder of Joyent, a hosting provider that also offers IaaS and PaaS services. “The Senate bill is just as bad, if not worse than SOPA. These are both dumb bills and [are] a classic example of industry-specific lobbyists creating stupid laws.”

Does that mean that the motion picture and recording industry has better lobbyists than SOPA opponents like Facebook, Twitter et al? Not really, it just shows that it’s easier to lobby when someone is supposedly a thief or a suspected terrorist, he said. “How do you lobby for freedom? That’s harder.” To be clear, Joyent has no plans to black out any sites and Hoffman has not been proactively front-and-center with his concerns. But when asked, he is eager to share them.

What really grates on Hoffman, is that the industries seeking protection — movie studios, record companies, publishing houses, broadcast networks — brought this mess on themselves. “Look at the list of companies supporting these bills. It could be a list of railroad companies a hundred years ago fighting the auto industry,” he said.

Had these SOPA supporters made their content available easily and affordably, they’d have no problem selling it, he said. ”If you ask someone why they ‘Bit Torrented’ a movie, it’s because they couldn’t buy it or rent it.” He added: “It’s not the consumer’s fault that the content they want has not been made available to them.” In short, these issues have nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with product distribution and pricing.

“If you look at how [the record companies] handled Napster well over a decade ago, you can’t tell me that EMI couldn’t have figured out how to do something with that model in all this time,” Hoffman said. But instead of building a viable, affordable electronic distribution system for their content, these companies now want laws to protect their businesses.

Many people are actually willing to pay multiple times for the same content if it comes in a more convenient format. People like me (an admitted oldster) have vinyl album collections that they duplicated with CDs and now have re-purchased from iTunes. There are a ton of such “triple dippers” out there, Hoffman said. “People are willing to pay for convenience.”

Then there are the nuts-and-bolts issues of how web companies are supposed to comply with these laws if passed. Initially, SOPA would have mandated that web companies block or re-route DNS (Domain Name Service) requests for sites deemed to be illegally hosting copyrighted content.

“My general frustration is that there’s no messing around with the DNS. You can’t just grab domain names; [it] creates a tremendous amount of work and doesn’t remotely touch the core problem. I’m not convinced there is a core problem”

SOPA hypocrisy

But what seems to get Hoffman’s goat more than anything is the double standard he sees. In early December, a minor furor arose when the “Great Firewall of China” blocked access to Joyent’s latest Node.js framework because the version number coincided with the date of the Tiananmen Square upheaval.

At the time Hoffman shrugged off the Chinese blocking issue and recommended that those in this country who made a federal case out of it pay closer attention to the restrictions SOPA would put on even the most popular web sites.

Thinking back on it now, he reaffirmed that stance: “Twitter and Facebook are awesome when they’re bringing down a dictator in the Middle East. They’re not awesome when someone is tweeting about some governor here.”

In other words, everyone should take a deep breath before enacting any legislation.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• A near-term outlook for big data
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012