Losing control of the world we made

Adobe Systems, the world's leading supplier of graphical software, is gradually shifting its business to a subscription model, baiting customers with features and tools available only to Creative Cloud subscribers. Among the first of these is Edge Reflow, which Adobe expects to become a must-have for Web designers — just as Photoshop, Illustrator and other tools in Adobe's Creative Suite are long-standing must-haves for millions of photographers and graphic designers. The difference is that you own Creative Suite when you buy it (or at least sense that you do). You only rent Creative Cloud when you subscribe to it.

So Adobe clearly wants you to move from owning software as a product to renting software as a service (SaaS). Already we see Creative Cloud's offerings subsuming those of Creative Suite, and Adobe clearly plans to increase the delta between the two until customers feel they have no choice but to subscribe to Creative Cloud, and to stop buying software by the package.

Microsoft has been doing the same thing with Office 365. Originally built for enterprise customers, Office 365 is now available for "home" customers as well. "Your complete Office in the cloud", will work on "up to 5 PCs or Macs", and is priced at $99.99/year or $9.99/month. Thats competitive with the price of Microsoft's boxed Office software, which gets stale as soon as the next major version comes out. Here too we can expect the rented offering to displace the owned one. It will take awhile, of course, but Microsoft's intent, like Adobe's, is clear.

It's easy to rationalize SaaS, which has long been a staple for enterprises. Nicholas G. Carr's The Big Switch accurately predicted a shift to "computing as a utility" back in 2004, long before utility services became known as "the cloud". Now that most people enjoy multi-megabit Internet speeds, even on mobile phones, SaaS is starting to make sense for them as well.

Also rationalizing this shift is the nature of proprietary software ownership. Even the packages of boxware you buy from Adobe and Microsoft are less owned than licensed. The collection of bits that come in a box, or downloaded from a virtual store, are not tangible property. Instead what you have is a bundle of rights for usage, governed by a seller to which the software remains attached by a service contract. So, the thinking then goes, why bother with old-fashioned ownership at all? Why not just rent?

We already rent many other things in the digital world, such as domain names. Here at Linux Journal, we don't own LinuxJournal.com. We rent it. Same goes for all the other domain names in the world. Every one is rented for finite periods of time. They can be bought or sold, but can only be possessed so long as the owner keeps paying a domain registrar for the right to use them exclusively. Meaning we rent them.

One can argue about the particulars outlined in the paragraphs above, but not with the slippery slope they go down. The software business is changing into a subscription business. In the process of that change, control over software is moving from individual owners to corporate suppliers.

Predictably and correctly, Richard M. Stallman bagan saying "the cloud" was "a trap" in 2008 (in this Guardian interview). A sample:

But there has been growing concern that mainstream adoption of cloud computing could present a mixture of privacy and ownership issues, with users potentially being locked out of their own files.

Stallman, who is a staunch privacy advocate, advised users to stay local and stick with their own computers.

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

And putty we are becoming. Look at the private app markets on mobile devices. The look and feel of the whole market is one of a rental system rather than an ownership system. Many apps are just UIs for cloud-based services, rather than stand-alone applications. Nothing wrong with that, other than the actual ownership and control we don't have.

Fact is, free and open source principles and methods don't fit well with cloud-based models of software development and deployment — or with their business models. Wikipedia does list a few open source iOS and Android apps, but those are just drops in an ocean of proprietary apps and services.

One name for the end-state of this shift is the "subscription economy". Here at Linux Journal we've been living in the subscription economy, as have all subscription periodicals. We have also done our best from the start to make our goods as free (as-in-freedom) as possible. We're not perfect at that, and we may never be; but free is where we come from. (In fact Linux Journal was originally conceived, way back in 1993, as a free software magazine.) Meanwhile most of the rest of the world lacks the same consciousness. Instead, the general consciousness has moved backward in time. In When It Comes to Security, We're Back to Feudalism,Bruce Schneier says we "pledge allegiance to the united states of convenience" when become "vassals" to the "feudal lords" called Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. He explains,

Feudalism provides security. Classical medieval feudalism depended on overlapping, complex, hierarchical relationships. There were oaths and obligations: a series of rights and privileges. A critical aspect of this system was protection: vassals would pledge their allegiance to a lord, and in return, that lord would protect them from harm... And it's this model that's starting to permeate computer security today.

Traditional computer security centered around users. Users had to purchase and install anti-virus software and firewalls, ensure their operating system and network were configured properly, update their software, and generally manage their own security. This model is breaking, largely due to two developments:

1. New Internet-enabled devices where the vendor maintains more control over the hardware and software than we do – like the iPhone and Kindle; and

2. Services where the host maintains our data for us – like Flickr and Hotmail.

Now, we users must trust the security of these hardware manufacturers, software vendors, and cloud providers. We choose to do it because of the convenience, redundancy, automation, and shareability.

He doesn't mention the phone and cable companies that intermediate our connections over the Internet. There too, the free and open spaces of the Net are being enclosed by overlords that are feudal to the core, and damned good . It has now been almost ten years since I wrote "Saving the Net" here. It begins,

Who Owns What?

That's the fundamental question... Much is at stake, including Linux and its natural habitat: the Net. Both have been extraordinarily good for business. Its perceived "threat" to Microsoft and the dot-com crash are both red herrings. Take away Linux and the Net, and both technology and the economy would be a whole lot worse.

Both the Net and Linux were created, grew and flourished almost entirely outside the regulatory sphere. They are, in a literal sense, what free markets have done with their freedoms.

Yet, there are some who do not care. Unfortunately, they're driving the conversation right now. Hollywood has lawmakers and news organizations convinced that file sharing is "piracy" and "theft". Apple, Intel and Microsoft are quietly doing their deals with the Hollywood devil, crippling (or contemplating the crippling of) PC functionalities, to protect the intellectual property of "content producers".

What we live in today is increasingly becoming Hollywood's model of the Net: one where we pay for everything that matters, and where everybody — creators and consumers alike — need constantly to "clear rights" for usage, whether they know that's what they're doing or not. More from "Saving the Net":

Two oddly allied mentalities provide intellectual air cover for these threats to the marketplace. One is the extreme comfort certain industries feel inside their regulatory environments. The other is the high regard political conservatives hold for successful enterprises. Combine the two, and you get conservatives eagerly rewarding companies whose primary achievements consist of successful long-term adaptation to highly regulated environments. That's what's happened with broadcasting and telecom.

As both of those industries become more Net-native, the Net itself gets taken over. This is already happening everywhere, as governments and industries look for ways to control usage upstream, inside the distribution mechanisms of the Net itself. Witness the new "six strikes" systems being put into place here in the U.S.