whither an open cloud manifesto

Many of you prob­ably have already heard about the Open Cloud Mani­festo. It’s the doc­u­ment that was craf­ted by IBM in an attempt to enun­ci­ate some broad prin­ciples to make those who are con­sid­er­ing a leap into the the warm, puffy, inter­op­er­able clouds (in con­trast to their own cold, dark, dank and pro­pri­et­ary data centres) get a warm and fuzzy feeling.

I’ve taken a very curs­ory look at it. Meh. To me, as a law­yer, it comes across as mar­ket­ing fluff. Nice mar­ket­ing fluff, but fluff non­ethe­less. For example, prin­ciple no. 2 says “Cloud pro­viders must not use their mar­ket pos­i­tion to lock cus­tom­ers into their par­tic­u­lar plat­forms and limit their choice of pro­viders.” What exactly does that mean? And why would it be lim­ited to mar­ket pos­i­tion? Would this mean that vendors would be able to use other means to lock in cus­tom­ers, such as refus­ing to provide ter­min­a­tion assist­ance services?

There is also the irony, as CNN has noted, that the mani­festo itself was not the sub­ject of an open or inclus­ive pro­cess. In addi­tion, as repor­ted in eWEEK, a num­ber of lead­ers in the area (Microsoft, Amazon and Google) have not signed on, for one reason or another.

It will be inter­est­ing to see what the industry does with it. And even more inter­est­ing to see how it plays out when it comes to cus­tom­ers. For example, I’d be very inter­ested in see­ing the reac­tion of those who signed on if a cus­tomer asked that this mani­festo be attached to their ser­vices agree­ment with a clause oblig­at­ing the cloud ser­vices vendor to com­ply with and act, in the course of provid­ing its ser­vices, con­sist­ently with the manifesto.

related:

1. The Vir­tues and Evils of Open Source  —  Part II
2. google open sourcing vp8 codec
3. The Vir­tues and Evils of Open Source
4. open source and copyright