A bill of rights for cloud computing
Cloud computing promises to liberate its adherents from the bother of messy implementations of software, while also freeing them from the constraints of hardware capacity. At the same time, however, cloud computing has the potential to deliver the ultimate in vendor lock-in.
My colleague, James Urquhart, has put together a proposed "cloud computing bill of rights" to help guide would-be cloud customers to those clouds best able to guarantee their freedom. Just as some are now clamoring for open-data commitments, James' suggestions are intended to deliver the value of the cloud without the lock-in:
No vendor shall, in the course of its relationship with any customer, claim ownership of any data uploaded, created, generated, modified, hosted or in any other way associated with the customer's intellectual property, engineering effort or media creativity. This also includes account configuration data, customer generated tags and categories, usage and traffic metrics, and any other form of analytics or meta data collection....
Vendors shall always provide, at a minimum, API level access to all customer data as described above. This API level access will allow the customer to write software which, when executed against the API, allows access to any customer maintained data, either in bulk or record-by-record as needed.
The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights is far more extensive than this, but I invite you to visit James' post to comment and help improve it. For the open-source friendly among us, we're going to have to look beyond licenses to protect essential user freedoms in the world of clouds, as Tim O'Reilly insists. James has offered a good start on how to go about doing this.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
How about not restricting access? Now I've got to pull it all down and put it on Google Docs - which will be fine. What a way to spoil a good thing.
How about not restricting access? Now I've got to pull it all down and put it on Google Docs - which will be fine. What a way to spoil a good thing.
And tons of bytes "captured" in diskettes!!!
Freedom of data backward?
In addition to eliminating lock-in, the transparent establishment of service-level commitments (James's article II) is key and will have broad-reaching implications for clouds:
- Cloud providers will need to establish policy-based internal systems for helping the cloud deliver on the SLAs that are promised to customers
- Users who can't find the transparency they need will roll-their-own, applying cloud platform technologies within their own datacenters
There continue to be a good number of exciting business and technology challenges in this space, but the promise remains huge.
Sam
http://www.appistry.com/blogs/sam
CEO of HostedDatabase.com
My firm launched the web's first Database-as-a-Service offering in 1999, and we adopted the cloud bill-of-rights early on. It is great to see them articulated here nearly 10 years later.
When you right that in such a way, your saying the Government has power over the business and grants these rights. This is the exact opposite of the US Bill of Rights, they "grant" nothing to anyone, they prohibit actions of the government itself. (err.. they are supposed to..)
Government restrictions on business are bad in all forms. Always say no to laws that claim they are granting you rights or freedom.. you do not need a law to grant you such things, you have it in absence of all laws.. in effect this law destroys the freedom of business owners and could have undesirable, unpredictable consequences as all laws do.
It is a solution looking for a problem.
Why it doesn't solve the problem of escalating IT costs should be obvious at a quick glance, but will be extremely obvious if your business gets shut down for a few hours or more due to a routing problem, your 'cloud' crashes(or would it dissipate?), and other crazy things that can happen to your internet connection.
Then of course, what happens if you miss a payment? What happens if your 'cloud' suddenly goes out of business.
Lots of hype, little substance. It has its uses, but not for anything even remotely critical which makes it a niche app at best.
One thing 30 years in the IT industry has taught me is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Another is that the only memory we seem to access is short-term. A third is that techno-marketeers rely on that, so they can put labels like "revolutionary" and "innovative" on platforms, products and services that are mere re-inventions of the wheel ... and often poor copies at that.
A good example is all the latest buzz about "Cloud Computing" in general and "SaaS" (software as a service) in particular:
http://tinyurl.com/6let8x
Both terms are bogus. The only true cloud computing takes place in aircraft. What they're actually referring to by "the cloud" is a large-scale and often remotely and/or centrally managed hardware platform. We have had those since the dawn of automated IT. IBM calls them "mainframes":
http://tinyurl.com/5kdhcb
The only innovation offered by today's cloud crowd is actually more of a speculation, i.e. that server farms can deliver the same solid performance as Big Iron. And even that's not original. Anyone remember Datapoint's ARCnet, or DEC's VAXclusters? Whatever happened to those guys, anyway...?
And as for SaaS, selling the sizzle while keeping the steak is a marketing ploy most rightfully accredited to society's oldest profession. Its first application in IT was (and for many still is) known as the "service bureau". And I don't mean the contemporary service bureau (mis)conception labelled "Service 2.0" by a Wikipedia contributor whose historical perspective is apparently constrained to four years:
http://tinyurl.com/5fpb8e
Instead, I mean the computer service bureau industry that spawned ADAPSO (the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations) in 1960, and whose chronology comprises a notable part of the IEEE's "Annals of the History of Computing":
http://tinyurl.com/5lvjdl
So ... for any of you slide rule-toting, pocket-protected keypunch-card cowboys who may be just coming out of a fifty-year coma, let me give you a quick IT update:
1. "Mainframe" is now "Cloud" (with concomitant ethereal substance).
2. "Terminal" is now "Web Browser" (with much cooler games, and infinitely more distractions).
3. "Service Bureau" is now "Saas" (but app upgrades are just as painful, and custom mods equally elusive).
4. Most IT buzzwords boil down to techno-hyped BS (just as they always have).
Bruce Arnold, Web Design Miami Florida
http://www.PervasivePersuasion.com
The "cloud" is about providing compute resources in a way that a generation of users who have grown up on the web expect. The web technology experience has three fundamental aspects:
1) Immediate Availability. Start a search and get going.
2) Ubiquitous Access. Access your data wherever, whenever.
3) The ability to share and collaborate your data.
Accessing your applications and data this way is a uniquely new experience. The "cloud" and "SaaS" are just bringing these experiences to the IT shop and the enterprise (not surprising since an increasing number of enterprise users grew up on the web.)
Items like the "Cloud Bill of Rights" are attempts to deal with a fundamentally age old question (who owns data) in a new technology environment. When that data is a picture of your dog at the beach, it's a small issue. When it's your companies financials or the architectural drawings of your next building, it becomes far more important.
As for IT people who insist the only solution is to not use the "cloud." the remind me of my old Director of Data Processing who refused to use PC's for anything. By the time he realized that his users demanded PC's and he had no choice, the client-server world had passed him by. Last I heard he was running Denny's in the central valley.
The incoming generation of users will demand the web based computing. We better start figuring out how to make it work. I don't know if a "Bill of Rights" is the right solution, but the discussion needs be had.
Treb Ryan
http://www.opsource.net
I have worn many hats in my day, but "SysAdmin" is not one of them:
Dream on about cloud computing being innovative. After you're through re-centralizing computing, the pendulum will swing to the next big wave of "innovation", which will no doubt be the re-invention of distributed computing.
What shall we call that? Rain?
Bruce Arnold, Web Design Miami Florida
http://www.PervasivePersuasion.com
- by samjohnston September 15, 2008 7:09 PM PDT
- I've just finished consolidating the independent efforts of James, Rich and myself into a draft document which I believe covers most of the issues:
- Reply to this comment
-
-
- by samjohnston September 15, 2008 7:17 PM PDT
- Let's try again with HTML tags:
-
-
(12 Comments)http://wiki.cloudcommunity.org/wiki/CloudComputing:Bill_of_Rights
Feel free to contribute; like Wikipedia you don't even need an account if you don't mind giving up your IP.
Sam
<a href="http://wiki.cloudcommunity.org/wiki/CloudComputing:Bill_of_Rights">http://wiki.cloudcommunity.org/wiki/CloudComputing:Bill_of_Rights</a>
There's also an associated <a href="http://samj.net/2008/09/cloud-computing-bill-of-rights-aka-ten.html">blog post</a>.
Sam