July 2nd, 2009
With clouds license arguments become fog
Matt Asay makes a great point.
When you are using a cloud software licenses don’t matter much. (Picture from NASA via Visible Earth.)
This has always been true, of course. Ever since the Web was spun, users of Web services have remained blissfully ignorant of disputes over software licenses. Licenses, we don’t need no steenkin’ licenses.
What is changing today is simply the balance of where client computing takes place. Power and responsibility are moving to what used to be called the server side.
Things I used to do on my PC, like get my mail and manage my calendar, are now done online. What matters is no longer who controls my software but who controls my data.
To Matt, this becomes a question of “data-driven lock-in,” with Google becoming Microsoft due to its “control” of my data.
But do they really control my mail? That’s not the deal implicit in the transaction. Just as with Google Health, I own my mail and my list of appointments.
What Google owns is not the data, but data about the data. They know I’m on those pages, and they have the right to sell ads against those page views. They can aggregate data about my use of the resource, both to manage it and to sell billboards alongside it.
You can argue it’s better than the deal you get here. When you post a TalkBack, that legally becomes the property of ZDNet.
This is not because ZDNet is greedier than Google. It’s convenience. Managing hundreds of licenses to the hundreds of comments on my controversial Steve Jobs post would drive everyone crazy. But it’s easy, once you aggregate all your mail in your inbox, to give you control.
What we’re entering, in license terms, is not a cloud era but a fog era. Clouds and fog are the same thing. The difference between them is in the eye of the beholder. If you can see clearly licenses and their terms are in the far distance. If you can’t, then you need a legal guide.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 07/03/09
