Cloud Computing: Time is Money

Why the demise of proprietary software is creating a vacuum which is about to be filled... and we may not like it.

The PC Arrives on the Desktop

When I was at college the PC or personal computer had not arrived. We bought computing time (at great expense) on the 'mainframe', and a friend of mine made a good living selling computing-time to companies in need of computation.

After college in my first job with a multi-national company, we saw our first PCs, and true to all apocrypha my boss brought his into the office to use SuperCalc (on which he built his subsequent promotion).

The IT admins hated it of course, they liked the terminals with their distinctly unfunky apps, they had control because they controlled the server. They wanted control; the PC was too clearly freedom writ large.

The Network arrives... along with a loss of freedom

The PC revolution ushered in an explosion of possibilities and freedoms but it was not long before these freedoms were eroded. 'Networking' was the first step. The price paid for access to a file-share area and the ability to use any PC in the building and still see the same desktop was... membership of the dreaded 'Domain'. Combine the restrictions of the Domain with the quickly rising cost of (desirable) proprietary software and the shine was going off the PC revolution. Just ask anyone in corporate network how free they feel.

The second wave of freedom arrives

The second wave of freedom arrived as a package. The Word Wide Web and Linux are roughly contemporaneous. It is hard to over emphasise the liberating effect of open access to the web and free, open source software. At a stroke proprietary software and network-related strangleholds were rendered irrelevant. Once again an explosion of possibilities and freedoms has occured and is occuring at a considerable rate.

Today I own my own hardware (actually I have quite a lot of it), no-one person or company owns or controls my software and I have the Web to play in. We are living in an unprecedented era of freedom. Thanks guys, thanks Tim B-L, thanks Linus T, thanks Richard S.

I think this freedom is under threat

My fear is that the web will be subsumed by the 'Clouds' servers and it will be controlled by hardware vendors.

The recent Cloud Computing Manifesto was weird. Signatories Cisco, AT&T, IBM and Sun account for an awful lot of the hardware on which 'Cloud' computing occurs so it makes sense that they would be keen on it. Red Hat and SAP are keen too but why? SAP is shedding jobs like dandruff and Red Hat still wants a seat at the top table as neo-mini Microsoft but what attracts these wannabes? Who knows?

What I do know is that unexpectedly two of the signatories, namely the mighty Microsoft and Google announced that they were unhappy with the level of transparency behind the scenes in the drawing up of the manifesto (ironic isn't it?). As a result they very publicly withdrew.

This must be significant, so significant that it warrants some speculation in the absence of any real hard facts.

Hardware v Software

It is worth reminding us all, software does not exist in a cloud it exists on computers. Information does not diffuse through the Ether, it is routed by cables and switches.

MS made its fortune when IBM stuck its operating system on its first PC, without the hardware it was valueless and vice versa. Apple too would not exist today if they had not fused their software with their hardware.

MS and Apple are obviously proprietary software vendors, software that they claim has a high intrinsic value and so charge accordingly and MS as we all know, used to be in symbiotic step with Intel: ditto Apple with its IBM chips For years they controlled the world hand in hand.

The point I am making is that hardware and software were tied together in a value related way. Neither had pre-eminence. Google is a bit different. Google is a gigantic information service provider based on free, open source software. The hardware software link looks a little different here.

FOSS breaks the relationship between hardware and software

Hardware is of course meaningless without software. Although I when I bought my ZX81 I just assumed that you were supposed to write your own software. Now though the free, open source software revolution means that software availability is no longer an issue either in quantity or cost. It's just there, lots of lovely stuff just begging to be used.

Do you see the problem though?

FOSS may mean that control is handed back to hardware vendors. The software-hardware partnerships have been dissolved...for better or worse.

A new era will come, I think, where the old status-quo will be re-established. An era when once again we buy time on the servers to do what ever it is we need to do... at a price set by the providers.

I remember only too well the days of centralised infrastructure controlled by IT departments whose instincts were pure totalitarianism. A time also when the software had an infinitely smaller value than the hardware (if you got any software at all) and the hardware was IBM. I would not like these times to come again.

The Open Source software revolution will count for nothing if a centralised hardware-centric form of computing gets a grip on our freedom.