Cloudy ideas about copyright control

In the morning I poke my head into a conference on cloud computing to hear about the evolution of software as a service and what applications people are choosing to run over the internet.

In the evening Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman rings to update me on his speaking tour round the country about threats to freedom. These include censorship, surveillance, restricted formats for representing data, software as a service and the war on sharing.

I tell him about the cloud conference, where people extolled the virtues of shifting customer and sales management systems to Salesforce. com, which was held up as the epitome of software as a service.

"What do you mean by cloud?" asks Stallman.

Indeed, that was the point of going. These terms always take a while to shake out.

Stallman is having none of it.

"The term 'cloud computing' is a symptom of confusion. It is used to include almost anything you might do with network, so it is a way of making old things sound new so people don't think about how it works," he says.

Stallman likes to know how things work so much, that when firms told him they owned the code that ran his computer and he wasn't allowed to see how it worked, he set out to create a version of Unix, GNU, that anyone could change to suit their purposes, as long as those changes were available to all.

That notion of copyleft invented for the GNU general public licence has provided the building blocks for so much of the software in use today.
When Stallman critiques an industry trend like software as a service, he does it from the perspective of someone who made it possible.

Storing data on remote servers in other countries under the control of people you don't know may be a threat to national security. Foreign governments or corporations may mine your data, or cut service if they have a beef with you.

When Stallman's government fingerprints you at the border, listens to your communications and, in some cases, copies the contents of your laptop as you cross the border, paranoia or at least extreme scepticism may seem a reasonable response.

The problem is most of us don't want to write our own operating systems and don't want to know more about computers than how to turn them on and log into Trade Me.

The reason people came to the cloud conference was not so much to plan what they should do as to learn how to manage what was being done in their organisations.

As one of the consultants for an organisation selling cloud services told me: "The CIOs [chief information officers] usually discover their organisations have gone into the cloud when they check the firewall logs."

That's when they may find salespeople have been going to Salesforce.com to manage their contact tracking, rather than using a clunky internal system.

The challenge then becomes to manage the transition and make it work for the wider organisation.

Brent Eddy, the sales operations and strategy manager for Gen-i, says Telecom's services subsidiary adopted Salesforce.com as a way to bring some order when the company was trying to deal with 20 different customer management systems.

The benefits came from having a single, trusted view of each client, uniform processes, greater ability to see what business was in the pipeline and reduced costs through simplified system architecture.

Less expected benefits were the greater innovation that comes from the vendor doing three releases a year, and improvements in governance and control. Problems that had previously not been picked up, such as sales agents holding back work so they could maximise commission when they were about to go on holiday, could be detected and countered.

Eddy says as for the fears that there could be liabilities in putting critical data with an off-site provider, internal systems are more likely to cause problems than the cloud.

Stallman still wants to keep control close to hand: "If you use someone else's server, you are handing over your digital life to that entity."
That control of one's digital life, and the broader topic of what makes digital society just or unjust, occupies Stallman's thoughts.

Just because governments can see which websites you have visited doesn't mean they should.

Look at the way Elliott Spitzer was forced to resign as governor of New York as an illustration of how information laws can be used to sabotage political opposition.

Stallman says making rules around software for the enrichment of those who make it rather than the benefit of those who use it has become a threat to civil liberties.

At times it seems he's swimming against the tide. But what if he's right?

adamgifford5@gmail.com

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