Dana Blankenhorn

The Myth of the Telco Cloud

The acquisition by CenturyLink (actually Qwest), an old-line telco, of Savvis, a new-line Web host and core networker, for $2.5 billion, is being sold as a way to boost “cloud computing services.” 

Well, I'm sure that's what they want you to think. But where's the cloud here?

Does Savvis have a cloud? No, they have hosting centers and fiber lines. Does CenturyLink have a cloud? No, it's a phone company.

So this is, in a way, just financial manipulation. But, as a small piece in AmLawyer notes, this is all part of a larger trend.

I call it the myth of the telco cloud.

Sympathy for the Crazy

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In last week's piece on the Crazy I tried to put what's going on with the Right in an historic context.

This week I want to put it into a personal context.

Consider. What if everything you were taught was true, all of your life, was suddenly revealed to be false? What if the assumptions by which you lived turned to quicksand?

You'd be pretty crazy too.

Back in 1971, when I was 16, I was sent to some academic event in upstate New York, and stayed at the “host home” provided by my school. It was a beautiful home, and the people within it beautiful people. But they were troubled. They were angry. They were liberals, and everything around them was collapsing.

The Slow Speed of Google News

In the last few weeks I've noticed a remarkable thing.

I seem to be getting the news first.

Notice I say seem to be because it's not often that a blogger is really the first person to a story on the tech beat. Unless something is being deliberately leaked to one outlet first (usually for placement) the first notice most outlets get is the press release. Or the news conference.

So why was it that I was seeing stuff I covered on Monday at news sites covering open source as late as Wednesday? And not with analysis and thought like I did it – I mean straight news stories that are taken right off the release?

The reason turns out to be pretty prosaic, I think. Most outlets don't yet believe in the Web. That is, they don't think they “have” a story until THEY have the story. It didn't happen until I noticed it, even if it's a press release I “noticed” by having an intern write up or (just as often) merely post the thing.

The result is that, in a growing number of cases, good analysis can beat the news by days.

There is an explanation for Atlanta missing the tornadoes. It's called math. Tornadoes are lines drawn haphazardly across the page. Most of the page remains blank. But journalists have to assume we're all morons. http://bit.ly/ksITrw

VMWare and Last Night's Cloud Lesson

As regular readers here know, the Cloud isn't a place, it's a technology. It consists of three basic layers:

1. Infrastructure -- The basic operating framework, what makes it work. Amazon's EC2 is a working cloud infrastructure. Open source projects like OpenStack are designed to replicate what this does and make it generally available.
2. Platform -- Think of this as the stack's Windows, as opposed to the Linux plumbing that may lay beneath it. Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform, sold as a service. VMWare has been building an open source cloud platform with its Cloud Foundry (right).
3. Services -- Software that actually does something. What the customer sees. Salesforce.com is a cloud service. Facebook and all those other social networks are cloud services. Services is where the money is.

Once you see the structure of the cloud, VMWare's purchase of Sliderocket makes sense. (And Yahoo's decision to spin out its Hadoop team makes no sense.)

Google Burns the Ships

One point Florian Mueller makes regularly at FOSSpatents is that Google is disadvantaged in patent fights because it's outgunned.

Its rivals have a lot of patents with which to negotiate legal settlements while Google's portfolio is small.

Events of this month show that Google has heard the criticism and is responding.

1. Google said early this month that it would buy Nortel's patent portfolio for $900 million. The figure could rise if another bidder emerges, but the point is these patents, while irrelevant to Google in and of themselves, act as legal ammunition against other large companies and against patent trolls.
2. Google said yesterday it would buy the patents of a bankrupt Israeli device maker, Modu, for $2 million. Google is explicitly stating now that it is buying these patents to protect itself from others' patent suits.
3. Google has formed its own patent consortium to protect its open source WebM video codec from the MPEG-LA patent consortium that wants to take it down in court. It's a corporate version of the Open Invention Network that tries to protect Linux (but which has been silent over attacks on Android, Google's Linux distro).

This is a short-form version of the turn Microsoft made in Burning the Ships.

Readers will recall that Microsoft tried to protect itself in the 1990s through agreements with business partners not to sue, but switched in the last decade to a policy of acquiring lots of patents and then signing cross-licenses that would let it get into other businesses royalty-free. Google didn't have time to invent its way out of trouble -- the lawsuits were coming too thick-and-fast -- but by buying patents it hopes to get similar protection.

Dropbox and Secret Source

In its zeal to take the "hacker's" side, ComputerWorld is misrepresenting what Dropbox did to Dropship.

To hear them tell it, Dropbox "censored" Dropship using a "bogus" DMCA "takedown" notice.

In fact Dropbox was simply protecting its "secret source."

Many projects that are open source have some sort of "secret source," some bit of programming that's essential to their system that they protect, either in an "enterprise" version or through a commercial, closed-source license. Sometimes it's a nifty front-end. Sometimes it's the key to making the program work.

Companies do this because they're not foundations. That is, one profit-seeking outfit is doing all the work, and they don't expect anyone else to help them protect the family jewels. It's one of the differences between open source as Eric Raymond proclaimed it in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and Free and Open Source Software as called for by Richard Stallman.

Dropbox is a free service for sharing files. It has chosen to stay completely "legit," and avoid upsetting the copyright industries, through close control of its secret source. You can argue about the ethics of this all you want, but that's what it has done in its licenses.

In this case Dropbox decided to protect its protocol. It made that proprietary.

The Government Forecast is Mostly Cloudy

In what may be the most significant move in the history of IT, America is moving to the cloud.

Follow the money and you'll see what I mean.

The U.S. government spends billions and billions of dollars on computing each year. When new CIO Vivek Kundra took office he found $27 billion in projects that were either behind schedule or over budget. 

Now, just as the media is hyperventilating over Amazon's FAIL with EC2 over the weekend, Kundra is being profiled as the man behind a cloud first strategy that will close 800 data centers.

So what's going on?

1. Amazon is not the only cloud out there. It is a vendor of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services. It is not “the cloud.”

2. Clouds are really just a more efficient way to run IT infrastructure. Any enterprise that doesn't embrace efficient is a dumb enterprise.

3. Still, there are a ton of large federal contractors who are threatened by the move toward a cloud paradigm, and all of them are quietly spreading FUD about reliability, security, and privacy in order to slow this train as much as possible.

The ZOMG, Hair On Fire Oh Noes Brigade and Open Source

Reporters have tricks. We take today's news, extrapolate it, and then go “oh noes.”

I have played the game myself. It's useful when you're writing a blog. But honesty demands that you use the extrapolation as just a possibility, a question for the reader, a point for discussion. Playing the reader for a fool, running around assuming the worst when you haven't even done your homework yet, that makes me mad.

While the TV heads have taken to specializing in this kind of laziness, spending last weekend telling us Apple was about to sell our trips to the highest bidder (or give it to the police so they could spy on us) – as if either cares – the players on my open source beat were having some of the same game on with Google's loss of a Texas patent suit. 

As half an hour of Googling would have told anyone, juries in the Eastern District of Texas are notorious for enabling bogus patent awards. Many companies have built offices in and around Tyler, Texas specifically so patent trolls can sue over nonsense. Even the judges who hear these cases sometimes tire of the antics.

This did not stop some from taking Florian Mueller's Oh Noes as gospel. Florian's German, not Texan. He knows there are courts there who can be as loony as any in Texas, but the appeals process there is shorter, and what happens in Germany usually stays in Germany. (He's also a very nice guy, as I learned when I visited him in Munich last year, where this picture was taken.)

But American reporters have the Google. Use it. Especially when Google itself is a defendant.

Instead we have lead sentences like this.  “In a decision that could have consequences to many of Google's businesses.” The plaintiff, “Bedrock Computer Technologies LLC,” is described uniformly as a “small Texas company,” Google as the equivalent of Tom Wolfe's “Great White Defendant” from “Bonfire of the Vanities,”  and they're going to take your Android phone away from you.

Please. Stop.

The Amazon Cloud Crisis

The failure of the Amazon EC2 cloud over the weekend should not have been that big a deal.

It became a big deal primarily due to Amazon's silence.

The lack of transparency made it easy for lazy journalists to do stories about how customers were re-thinking the cloud  as though Amazon and the technology were one.

They're not. Amazon is the best-known commercial cloud in the marketplace, although consumers probably didn't know that until this weekend.

Still, this should have been on Amazon's AWS blog  from the time the outage started. But it wasn't. In fact it still isn't. It's this lack of transparency that's the problem, not the cloud concept itself.