The problem with the “cloud model”
During the panel that I participated in at OSBC the panelists were asked what they thought of the “Google model” of computing. I was rather negative about this. Actually, according to Yahoo News, I said “The Google model really scares me”. Yep, that sounds about right. I talked about this before. Where’s my data and Google’s subpoena is a sign of some of the downside of their server centric approach… . So consider this part three of an ongoing series…
Here’s a new example why the cloud model is flawed - and just for kicks, it’s not picking on Google but on Adobe this time. Adobe recently released their Web version of Photoshop Express. If you ignore the cute “the lawyers make us do this” tool-tips and actually click through the terms of use you’ll find language like this:
Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.
So when you use their web software you grant Adobe worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and sublicensable rights to use, reproduce, modify(!), publish(!) and derive revenue(!) from your images.
Wow. One more reason why I don’t like these “cloud services”.
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Did you switch to a non-full-text feed? Starting recently, I’m only getting excerpts of your posts in my reader.
On this post, this was all I got:
It’s fine if you decided to make that change (thought I’d be interesting in hearing why ;-) ), or maybe something is broken. Anyway, just wanted to ask! :-)
Yep, that’s intentional. I have several (I’ve found four so far) “spamblogs” reusing my content verbatim - and so far they only use the RSS feed…
Well, that’s kind of similar to what Google and others have in their terms of use… but then I guess that’s your point.
Hallo uncle Dirk!
I do my best to avoid random posting in places, but I felt it important to comment here re: “cloud” services.
- “freebie” services always include a certain level of mea culpa — flickr is not the end-all-be-all archive of photographs for all time; gmail is not the indomitable fortress for email.
- Once someone enters a fiduciary/financial contract of any sort for a service, the provider is beholden to the promises made during the signup or they can face litigation. Uptime guarantees, data backups and security, etc. all become legal liabilities that must be upheld.
Considering the above the freebie “cloud” model, in the gmail sense, has been around for 10 years (hotmail/yahoo mail, etc.) and I am in complete agreement that you can’t commit complete faith in “where your data is” with them.
Modern rapid-provision VPS/”cloud computing” offerings such as amazon’s EC2 and the unnamed service provider I work for, on the other hand, offer full guarantees as to where your data will (or won’t!) be.
You might consider this nitpicking but, while the colloquial term “cloud computing” still has some fleshing-out to do, it is definitely still in the proving grounds as a viable model and should not be confused with the aforementioned monolithic offerings.
Anyhow, even though I didn’t get to spend as much time chatting as I’d have liked, it was nice to see you (&k &h &s) again this month.
Daniel is of course right - the context of this post may not be clear unless you read the Yahoo article (or were in the room during the panel).
I am speaking specifically about the “Google model” and similar “free” services with a catch.
I do have some concerns about the way many contracts even for the “paid for” services are written (they still tend to be excessively asymmetrical), but they were not the intended target of this post.