Microsoft's licensing cripples its relevance to the Amazon cloud
Could Microsoft's proprietary licensing end up hurting it in the cloud?
That's the question asked on the Cloud Avenue blog, and the answer seems to be a clear "yes." Whatever the benefit to Microsoft in a desktop and server world, proprietary licensing stands to hobble its attempts to be widely relevant in the cloud or, at least, in Amazon.com's EC2 cloud.
Why? Because Microsoft's proprietary licensing ensures it can't be a viable player in Amazon's newly announced Paid AMI (Amazon Machine Image) Support marketplace. The program allows users to "share AMIs...with other users for a fee," but it turns out that this sharing only works with open-source operating systems:
This works well for open-source operating systems like Linux and OpenSolaris. Developers can set up the OS on local machines, build an application stack on top of it, optimize it, bundle it as AMI, and share them with other users. The freedom offered by open-source licensing allows them to be a player in this EC2 marketplace. Anyone sitting in any country in the world can offer personalized AMIs to anyone else in the world and make money out of it.
This is not the case with proprietary Windows-based AMIs. EC2 users can only take the bare-bones Windows AMIs offered by Amazon and install applications on the running EC2 instances. This is due to the proprietary nature of Windows OS licensing restricting the options for users. Under current licensing terms, there is no way for others to build an application stack on top of Windows OS, optimize and deliver it as ready made AMIs to other customers. In short, Windows based EC2 is not a player in the above-said marketplace due to its restrictive licensing policies.
Perhaps Microsoft doesn't care. Perhaps its cloud offerings will be of Microsoft, for Microsoft. But this isn't how Microsoft became the dominant desktop vendor that it is today. Microsoft dominates because it opened its technology enough to become the center of a vibrant ecosystem.
By cutting itself off from others' cloud-based offerings, Microsoft has chosen to go it alone. This could be a winning strategy, but my money is on the companies that can drive widely dispersed value from the cloud. With its proprietary licensing, Microsoft will not be among this group.
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. 
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html
"cloud" is another meaningless buzzword that the clueless parrot. It is nothing more then a modified mainframe system.
Except for the bit where it's not a mainframe because a mainframe is one massively parallel computer, not a cluster of standard computers networked together to act in concert.
So, apart from 'remotely accessed browser application and services cluster' you got any snappy names for it? Let's just stick with 'cloud' and maybe you can find less trivial to get in a knot about.
If you have a better name I'll download that to my mental portfolio and cascade the information to my associates.
I bet you think AJAX is some radical concept also.
A cluster of computers working together is the same as a "massively parallel computer".
That the nodes may be long distances apart is a trivial difference. If you knew anything about parallel computing you would know this.
Cloud is just a meaningless buzzword to describe a few cosmetically different parts of the same core system.
It doesn't matter if the client is a browser based AJAX program, or a more traditional GUI based desktop app(*** do you think a browser is?) it is a mainframe.
"Cloud is just a meaningless buzzword to describe a few cosmetically different parts of the same core system."
No, 'Cloud' is the term used by network engineers to describe 'the internet'. Do a Cisco course sometime, please, maybe you'll be so enraged by the continuous description of the internet as 'The Cloud' that you'll kill the instructor, be put in prison and never be heard from again.
So, 'Cloud Computing' is computing across the internet or, as the provider of 90% of the hardware that runs the internet like to call it (them and OpNet), the Cloud, so called because outside of your own little part of it you only have a vague idea off what's really going on.
I'd wager you're not a network engineer. I'd also wager you're not a systems engineer or software developer either.
"A cluster of computers working together is the same as a "massively parallel computer"."
I expect you believe there's no difference between 1gbps Ethernet and Infiniband too, that nothing can be gained from using Fibrechannel over SCSI. It's abubndantly clear that you have little to no experience programming or you'd know that it's not at all the same.
Having dedicated hardware with multiple redundancy, failover, hot-swappable everything (including CPUs) and a cohesive single operating system a mainframe is substantially more capable than a bunch of separate computers that happen to be working together. Clusters are just cheaper for most purposes where tasks can be subdivided into discrete subtasks largely independent of each other. Some tasks, however, are so impeded by the latency of having to move data across a network that they need an actual mainframe with internal bus speeds far in excess of what even Infiniband can hope to offer.
If you think a cluster of PCs is the same thing as a mainframe you clearly don't know what a mainframe actually is.
"I bet you think AJAX is some radical concept also."
Reread my first paragraph, I just expanded that acronym. That you have no problem with the term AJAX for a set of technologies which doesn't necessarily include XML but you take issue with a simple name to encompass a particular form of delivery of services despite there being _no_other_simple_term_for_it_ is interesting. Especially the bit where you don't get where the name comes from in the first place.
"That the nodes may be long distances apart is a trivial difference. If you knew anything about parallel computing you would know this."
It appears I know more than you as only someone completely ignorant could think that distance doesn't incur latency and someone with even the most basic knowledge of computer architecture would know that ethernet is monstrously slow compared to the internal bus speeds of even the x86 architecture. The moment data leaves the computer to be processed elsewhere a penalty is incurred. Welcome to network programming 101.
"It doesn't matter if the client is a browser based AJAX program, or a more traditional GUI based desktop app(*** do you think a browser is?) it is a mainframe."
What exactly is it you think a mainframe does? Just serve applications? Why are you describing what happens on the client side when comparing two uses of computers which are clearly server side? When am I ever going to run a browser on an IBM zSeries 990? While I'm here, I don't suppose you even understand why AJAX apps are substantially more bandwidth heavy than client-run applications?
The jury's still out on whether you'll be able to run an open stack on Azure, or whether Microsoft will find some way to stretch the licensing lock-down so you can float within their cloud without floating out, or maybe even to stretch their licensing models enough to allow floating within other folks' clouds, or between clouds. But there's an opportunity here for a "lock into Azure, float within Azure" kind of ecosystem/lockdown balance that sounds very analogous to the classic DOS/WIndows lock-in ecosystem. If there's a pool somewhere, my money goes here: Microsoft will crow-bar "Azure-locked cloud computing" into their many license documents and libraries, and try to make the Azure cloud be the Windows Desktop of cloud computing.
- by mikedatl November 16, 2008 8:21 AM PST
- This is just the tip of the iceberg for MS licensing in the cloud. The problem is MS licensing is tied to a physical device. What happens when you move your app in the cloud? You don't own the device it's running on so licensing becomes complex at best and down right impossible most likely. It's not just MS that gets hit by this. Most ISVs are going to have licensing issues in a cloud environment - whether that cloud is in the corporate datacenter or at a 3rd party.
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