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Chinese robots
<originally a Ducth column on Webwereld>
Last weekend the news broke that the electronics manufacturer Foxconn was planning to replace a large number of its million or so Chinese workers with robots. Foxconn manufactures most of the gadgets that readers of Webwereld like to comment on and bicker about.
Over the last 15 years, Western countries have rapidly moved their industrial infrastructure to China. Initially this was not glaringly obvious, but nowadays most gadgets say: "Designed in California – Made in China". We all seem to think the low labour costs are a justification for moving the factories to a country that only 20 years ago was crushing students with tanks, especially if it means affordable gadgets and bolsters the profits of Western companies that provide our pension funds.
Foxconn and its much smaller rivals constantly compete to lower costs and increase production. People, even very cheap people, can quickly become a bottleneck. They may work 12-14 hours a day, but only for 26 days per month. Robots work 24/7 (minus some downtime for maintenance). And robots are spreading to other sectors: from offshore oil platforms to ATM machines, from self-scan tills to ticketing on public transport. A robot does not need to look like a person to replace a person. We gadget-lovers think it’s just peachy that Foxconn keeps the prices low. But there is a problem.
Over 100 years ago, Henry Ford successfully developed the concept of mass production of complex consumer products. According to Ford, the trick was to make quality products as efficiently and cheaply as possible., While paying your factory workers so well they would also become paying customers. Because if you mass-produce, you also need masses of customers. But if an increasing share of the production is performed by robots, who will your customers be? The classic answer has been that the unemployed factory workers then find new, better jobs as a municipal official, an insurance salesman or or web designer. And this indeed was the case during the switch from an industrial to an information/service economy. Machines caught up with us physically a while ago, but now they are increasingly taking over post-industrial jobs. They are doing so at a pace equal to or higher than jobs are created by economic growth. Even China’s near-slave labourers are not immune to this process. While human labour will only become more expensive, robots are becoming cheaper. The outcome is clear.
A 2010 American research paper shows that the labour market is indeed becoming polarised. It now consists of highly-qualified work for a small proportion of the population and for the rest, low-value services which have yet to be automated (nearly all industry has moved to Asia). The low-value category is further eroded by ever advancing technology. The numbers for the Netherlands seem ok but that has also to do with its large public sector (healthcare, education) and hundreds of thousands of "medically-unfit-for-work" skewing those numbers.
Marshall Brain, the man behind howstuffworks.com, wrote a book way back in 2002 that can be read here. His alarming theory sounded implausible back then, but looking at the current situation in the US, with 45 million people living on food stamps and a real unemployment rate of over 20% (according to European-style calculations), it now suddenly doesn’t look so bad. The fact that the richest 400 Americans, own as much as the poorest 150 million altogether and are in de-facto control of the country, confirms Marshall’s prediction of extreme wealth & power concentration.
Marshall Brain’s novel also suggests a way to escape the BladeRunner-style world. The book is set in an egalitarian Australia society where robots meet all our basic needs for free or almost free. There are no paid jobs , but that is not a problem as long as everyone has enough for a decent life. Most of his countrymen would call this "communism". Here in Europe we might have a more nuanced view.
Robots + 3D printers + open source software makes possible an extreme decentralization of production, and hence wealth and power. Much of the work currently undertaken in China and India could come back to Europe, but not necessarily as paid work, that is unless Chinese robots somehow work more cheaply than European robots. But that seems unlikely as the main inputs, material and energy prices, are the same worldwide. So ultimately we could all enjoy an almost permanent holiday, which could be handy when summers only occur in May and September.
Unsuitable
<originally a webwereld column in Dutch>, <also on HuffPo UK>
Over nine years ago, I was talking to Kees Vendrik <Dutch MP) about the broken Dutch software market. Not only was it impossible to buy a top brand laptop without buying a Microsoft Windows licence, it was also impossible to visit many websites (municipalities, Dutch railways and many others) without using Internet Explorer. The latter area has greatly improved and I can lead my life using my OS and browser of choice. Only occasionally do I have to just swallow a Windows licence when buying a new laptop. Not much has improved in that area. Our national dependence on products such as MS Office has not really diminished either, despite all the wishes of our Parliament and its related governments policies.
Meanwhile, the technological seismic shift that frightened Bill Gates so much back in ’95 (the web makes the operating system irrelevant) is fast becoming reality. Almost all new developments discussed by IT power players and specialists are web-based or based on open specifications and the most commonly used applications are running quite well as service in a browser.
So while the 15-20 year old problem of software dependency is not yet solved (our government, with its tens of thousands of IT workers, is still unable to wean itself off the familiar Microsoft technology stack) its impact is becoming less relevant. Meanwhile, new dependencies based on cloud providers are promising to be even more detrimental.
While excessive use of proprietary software creates the risk of foreign manipulation and potential attacks on critical infrastructure (eg Stuxnet). But at least if your systems are attacked in this way, there are some ways to track this. If you are working on the computer that does not belong to you, that is based in a foreign country and is managed in ways you cannot know, it will be very difficult to have any control over what happens to your data.
The old assumption, that using local servers could be part of the solution, seems unfortunately to be an illusion. All cloud services offered by companies based in the US are subject to US legislation, even if the servers are physically in another country. And US law is now somewhat, shall we say, problematic. With no evidence, but with an allegation of involvement in "terrorism", systems can be closed down or taken over – without any warning, or the possibility of adversarial judicial review. The term ‘terrorism’ has been stretched so far in that anyone who allegedly breaks US law, even if they’re not a US citizen and even if they’re not in the US can still a deemed "terrorist", just on the word of one of the many three-letter services (FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, DHS, TSA, etc.). The EU is not happy about this but does not want to go so far as reccomending its citizens and other governments to no longer use such services.
The long arm of the US Patriot Act goes even further than merely the servers of US companies on European soil. Thus domains can be "seized" and labelled: "this site was involved in handling child pornography". Try explaining that as a business or non-profit organisation to your clients and (business)partners. Just using one .com, .org or .net extension as your domain name now makes you liable under US law. All Europeans can now be seized from their homes for breaking US law. So a .com domain name makes your server effectively US territory.
We were already aware that proprietary platforms like Windows and Google Docs were not suitable systems for important things such as running public or critical infrastructure. However, now it turns out, that every service delivered through a .com / .org / .net domain places you under de facto foreign control.
Solution? As much as possible, change to open source software on local servers. Fortunately there quite a few competent hosting companies and businesses in the Netherlands and Europe. Use local country domains like .nl/.de./.fr or, if you really want to be bullet proof, take a .ch domain. These are managed by a Swiss foundation and these people take their independence seriously. Wikileaks today is running on wikileaks.ch after its domains such as .org got a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay.
If you still want to use Google Docs, Facebook, Evernote, Mind Meister, Ning.com, Hotmail or Office 365 – please do so with the awareness that you no longer have any expectation of privacy or any other form of civil rights. Good for the administration of the tennis club but completely unsuitable for anything that really matters.
The six million dollar man a reality?
This interesting PBS Hour video shows several bionics projects that use state-of-the-art robotica in creating artificial limbs to assist the disabled.
Internet, Privacy, Copyright; Choose Two
The Dutch Considerati think tank reported earlier this week that there is still widespread downloading in the Netherlands. But for an allegedly ‘broad’ piece of research, some key parties were missing – Bits of Freedom, for example. Nor did the study consider fundamental questions about the social or economic value of copyright that lasts for more than a century (when once it only lasted for 15 years), probably because those ordering the report did not want that question asked, let alone answered. There was also no mention of the copyright industry aggressively lobbying behind closed doors where laws are hammered out that our European representatives are not even allowed to see, let alone influence.
The entire debate is reduced to a financial accounting exercise for a particular industry. So all is perfectly OK then, as I have nothing to do with it – I don’t work in that industry – nor indeed do the vast majority of people. The comments on Webwereld.nl quickly show that almost nobody takes such research seriously.
A lawyer from the American RIAA recently added some colour by saying that the public domain blocked free market capitalism. So much honesty can be scary sometimes. But the recent high point of the "e"G8 meeting in Paris was when Sarokozy and a few captains-of-industry gathered to decide what we should be allowed to do with our internet in the future. In response, a few uninvited representatives of civil liberties organisations held their own press conference (video – Lessig sums it up nicely from 7:00 minutes onwards).
These examples make it absolutely clear that the idea of any reasonable discussion with these vested interests is pure fiction. Wise people like Prof. Lawrence Lessig have been trying to start such a discussion for a decade, without success. Writer and activist Cory Doctorow also tries to find a reasonable ‘middle ground’ between the interests of authors, the copyright industry and the rest of society, and himself provides a good example with his DRM-free books. The copyright industry (or “entertainment industry "in the Considerati report) ensures that any such a discussion is absolutely impossible by claiming industry interests and rights are absolute, without providing much of a broader social context. Large parts of the Considerati report read along the lines that providers of bottled mineral water are losing a lot of money because the local municipality washes its buses with tap water.
This week, a UN report declared that uninhibited access to the internet was a human right. This makes the French HAPODI law (whereby, after three alleged transgressions, the citizen is disconnected) a human rights violation. As long as people have internet access, they will download material. If there is anything to be learned from the internet’s last 15 years, it is that repressive measures against making digital copies always fail. Next year there will be yet more storage, wider bandwidths and cheaper processing power. This will only stop if we give up those basic rights as defined by the UN. A digital police state of Stalinist proportions would be needed to prevent copying. It is not insignificant that it is the copyright industry itself that is blocking any real move towards a wide-ranging public discussion on the reform of copyright.
There is a well-known rule for complex projects: Good, Fast, Cheap – choose two. You can get good and fast but it will cost. Good and cheap is possible, but it may require a little patience. All three at once is usually not possible. We can apply a similar formula to the ‘download debate’:
Internet, Privacy, Copyright; Choose Two.
We can have the internet with the current functionality and openness while maintaining the right to privacy and free speech – but maintaining a 20th-century copyright model at the same time is impossible. Or we could give up our privacy and other civil rights to allow one specific industry to earn money in the same old way for a little longer. A last option would be to switch off the internet. But that is not realistic: a country like the Netherlands could not survive a day without the internet, any more than it could survive without electricity.
As a society we’re going through the painful realisation that we can only have two out of the three options. Different vested-interest groups would no doubt make different choices but, like the vast majority of the people, I opt for the internet and privacy (this symbolises a whole range of civil rights). And thus the outcome of the process is already established, assuming we have a somewhat-functioning democracy (ACTA people do sometimes have doubts about this). Lawrence Lessig once joked during a presentation in Berlin that he, like Gorbachev, wanted to reform the system enough so it could be kept in place. Reform does not appear an option, rather a non-violent revolution is likely to happen.
Like any social change (the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage), this is also accompanied by heated debates, occasional legal sabre rattling and periodic propaganda reports from hired guns. But historically that will be just so much background noise. Maybe there will come a time, in the not too distant future, when basic civil rights make a comeback, upheld by the legislature and supported by the law enforcement agencies.
Until then, we citizens must defend our online rights with technical skills. Privacy can be upheld with crypto. To ensure mobile network neutrality, run all your traffic through a VPN . On a day-to-day basis, it is not crazy to suggest that we should all explore the use of privacy tools more thoroughly.
Debate between HAR2009 en BREIN at Hacking at Random
Doctor, doctor …
A MP stumbles, coughing, into the doctor’s surgery. There is blood pouring from the ears and nose and left eye. “Doctor, doctor, I’ve just had a bad fall and I think I’ve broken my wrist” gasps the MP. The doctor has a look and briefly feels the pulse. “Does that hurt?” “A little bit” mumbles the MP. “I don’t think it’s that bad” says the doctor. Unfortunately I can’t check it today as the digital X-ray machine is broken”. The MP is swaying back and forth. “It’s probably just a bruise, the nurse will give you a sling. Take it easy for a couple of days and come back if it’s still painful.” The MP staggers out of the surgery, still bleeding from the ears, nose and eye. The doctor is already focused on the file of the next patient, because doctors are very busy.
The process described above resembles the way the Court of Audit went about answering MPs questions about our national IT strategy. The MPs asking those questions were not experts and the Court provided simplistic answers without providing any context or stopping to consider whether the symptoms might be part of a broader problem. The newly-published report failed to respond even to the superficial questions and, moreover, based its answers on minimal data. Which is a disgrace, as it is precisely the role of the Court to delve into the deeper issues.
Instead of focusing on the 88 million euros spent on licence fees (less than 1% of the total annual licence expenditure), the Court could and should have explored why a different approach can work in other European countries, but fails in the Netherlands. Is this country really so different from Finland, Germany, France or Spain? As their colleagues in the Central Planning Bureau had done in 2009, the Court could have produced its own qualitative analysis of the macro-economic effects of large-scale, open source implementations. This as a viable alternative to annual imports totalling of more than 8 billion, primarily from the USA. The macro-economic demand alone is relevant since the VAT and profit tax of this trade ends up predominantly in the Irish treasury, because of inter-EU trade regulations. (I ‘m not necessarily against bailing out Ireland but this can surely be done more efficiently). Also the figures of the 2004 SEO study are still current enough to be indicative for order of magnitude estimates.
As one of the ‘experts’ consulted by the Court, I am very disappointed by the minimalist approach it took. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised – after all, in a previous report, the Court had also dithered, even after they had determined the government really had no insight whatsoever into its own IT spending. It is beyond me why a subject such as IT, where so many aspects can go so terribly wrong, is not more thoroughly and strategically overseen. In my written input to the Court last year I proposed several clear ways to frame the fundamental questions. For those who, like doctors, are very busy here is a summary:
Dear MPs, the Netherlands is a modern western country with access to the same knowledge, technology and IT budgets as Germany, France, Spain and Finland. Today all these countries have already achieved widespread adoption of open source and open standards in government. The work of the Dutch government is also very similar to these countries – certainly generic aspects such as office automation. So, eight years after the original and unanimous vote by parliament, surely the only reason that the Netherlands cannot implement this policy is our administrative culture and our Atlanticist political orientation. There is certainly no fundamental reason why the results of the other countries I mentioned cannot be replicated in the Netherlands, particularly because those same countries have already done all the preliminary research for us. But in recent years potential obstacles for migration have been elevated to norms, rather than being correctly identified merely as part of a problem to be solved.
Parliament should no longer accept high dependence on a supplier being invoked as an excuse for not making progress towards becoming less dependent on that supplier (as the government did in response to parliamentary questions in in 2004, 2006 and 2008). The high dependency is the problem that must be solved, not an immutable law of nature where IT departments are the powerless victims.
Parliament should no longer accept the acknowledged lack of technical and organisational expertise of the 60,000 government IT professionals (and its suppliers) as a valid excuse for the lack of progress. It is implausible that the Dutch state cannot find the requisite skills to replicate the results of its European neighbours. Any IT staff and management found lacking in the necessary skills to carry out the very reasonable requests from parliament should be retrained or replaced. Incompetence is grounds for dismissal, not a valid excuse to refuse to do the work.
Of course there will be problems in unravelling this gigantic Gordian knot, created by decades of accumulated proprietary software. But the most frequently cited excuses for not making a start with OSS and OS are similar to those used by asbestos manufacturers: "yes, but it is handy", "we have been using it for so long", "we are comfortable with it", "we know nothing else". All factually correct statements, of course, but certainly not valid excuses to prevent us from finding an alternative solution.
If the government had started making these changes way back in 2002, as parliament voted to do, the cutbacks we’re now suffering in education and health care would have been more than covered.
On this issue, the Netherlands seems to have been reduced to providing the frightening role for the rest of Europe on “how not to do it….”. Too bad.
Parliament’s questions to the Court of Audit
Preamble
The Lower House of the Dutch Parliament has asked the Court of Audit to investigate the problems and opportunities related to the adoption of open standards and open source software for the government’s information systems. The Court has invited various experts to give their views. This blog post is my contribution.
The questions are being asked to the highest supervisory body of the country, rather than the departments responsible for implementing this policy – the Ministries of Home Affairs, and also Economic Affairs, Agriculture & Innovation – eight years after the government’s first unanimous vote on this issue and the expenditure of about 5 billion euros on licensing fees. The impression given to the outside world is that Parliament is not impressed with the progress of the last eight years and believes that the relevant government departments could benefit from the external scrutiny of a neutral and objective body.
Each of the following five questions implies a series of unspoken assumptions. In order to answer the questions, it is necessary to identify and, where neccesary, challenge these underlying assumptions in order to reach a sensible answer.
The five questions
Here are the answers to the questions raised by Parliament. There is so much interdependence that subsequent responses will sometimes refer back to earlier parts.
“You cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it”
1.What possibilities and scenarios exist for the reduction of closed standards and the introduction of open source software by the central government (ministries and related agencies) and local authorities?
The Netherlands is a modern western country and has the same access to knowledge, skills, technology and comparable budgets for IT as Germany, France, Spain and Finland. It is a fact that all these countries have already implemented large-scale adoptions of open source and open standards in government. The implementation requirements of the Dutch government are also very similar to these countries. The reason that The Netherlands has not moved further in this area, eight years after the original, unanimous Parliamentary vote, can therefore be attributed to nothing more than the administrative culture and our Atlanticist political orientation.
There is no fundamental reason why the achievements of these other countries cannot be replicated in The Netherlands, especially as the groundwork has already been done. Barriers to migration have often been treated as immutable laws of nature rather than just a problem to be solved.
- Parliament should no longer accept that a high dependence on one supplier is an adequate excuse not to move away from that very dependency (as the Cabinet did in response to parliamentary questions in 2004 and 2006 and 2008). The dependency itself is the problem that must be addressed, not an enshrined principle that IT departments must endure.
- Parliament should no longer accept that the acknowledged lack of technical or organisational knowledge amongst the 60,000 government IT professionals (and their suppliers) is an excuse for the lack of progress. It is implausible that the Dutch government is incapable of replicating the successful work of its European counterparts. Any governmental IT or management staff who do not have the requisite skills to carry out the very reasonable requests of Parliament should be replaced or retrained. Incompetence is grounds for dismissal, certainly not an excuse for refusal to do the necessary work.
- Intrinsic motivation works better than coercion. Administrators and IT staff who understand the wishes of Parliament can embrace it with real conviction and are likely to want to produce better results than those who only work under duress. Such an approach will select and promote suitable people to the right jobs. The staff whose policies and behaviour have caused our current problems are probably not going to the ones who find the necessary solutions.
- The link between HR and remuneration policies for IT professionals and achieving technical certification related to proprietary software from a handful of suppliers must be completely severed.
“When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”
2. What part of closed standards and software can be replaced by open standards and open source solutions and what cannot?
This question has yet another unspoken assumption: that central government has a realistic oversight of all systems, applications and related standards. It does not. As a result, questions about the number of systems that can be replaced are very hard to answer and have little relevance to achieving lower costs and greater independence in the foreseeable future – primarily because of the very large differences in costs that are associated with different standards. The government would do well to focus on the most common, generic issues, for which proven alternatives already exist. The original 2002 Vendrik Parliamentary motion already asked for this.
Key points to identify: what are the most expensive closed source areas where functional open source alternatives already exist and are already being used successfully elsewhere? What are the closest functioning areas that can result in successful migrations?
Migration plans should be drawn up in these areas as a matter of high priority – and this means halting or delaying other projects that may block these migrations and accelerating projects that play a supporting role.
For instance, in 2005 the former Ministry of Economic Affairs produced a document management system which has made it virtually impossible for years for the Ministry to use other web browsers, word processors or desktop operating systems. This is particularly surprising as, in 2004, the government itself announced that such closed systems in the work environement were harmful and undesirable, and were therefore going to be actively addressed as per the wishes of Parliament.
A current, concrete example within national government is the introduction of SharePoint. There is a significant risk that this investment, once made, will be (ab)used yet again as an excuse not to migrate to open and available alternatives. That would take us up to 2016 (14 years after the initial Parliamentary decision!) before any real work could begin on migration.
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
3.What are the current costs? What are the predicted up-front and structural costs costs of moving from closed standards and the introduction of open source software? What are the projected savings?
The Dutch government currently spends about one billion Euros on proprietary software licences annually. These licences are mainly foreign, and the income tax and VAT on this expenditure flows into the Irish exchequer, because most European branches of American software companies are based there. The total Dutch expenditure is eight times more. Both governmental and general software expenses grow by about 10% per annum and are therefore unsustainable.
A significant portion of these annual costs can be saved or ploughed back into the local economy through Dutch SMEs, and so this cost will be an investment in the Dutch knowledge economy. With the government as the leading customer in this new market structure, it is feasible that The Netherlands could save billions per year.
In addition to these direct costs, various indirect savings could increase this amount many times over: the costs of management and security for vulnerable mono-cultures; the cost of merging old legacy systems and new applications; and social costs caused by security failures and easily avoidable software security problems. Every month there are Dutch hospitals whose primary processes are severely disrupted by computer viruses – a direct result of monoculture.
Moving beyond the financial, it becomes more difficult to quantify the social impact of the high dependency level of Dutch society on certain foreign, privately-owned companies. However, if more than 80% of the PCs in The Netherlands can be remotely controlled or even switched off, what does that say about Dutch national sovereignty? Is it politically acceptable for foreign software suppliers or government bodies to have an On/Off switch for ministries, municipalities, police, hospitals, water works, supermarkets, schools etc…?
“The best moment to plant a tree is 25 years ago, the next best moment is now.”
4.How would the reduction of closed standards and the introduction of open source software be realised?
With not only the right mandate (which Parliament actually voted for eight years ago!), but also the right expertise significant results are attainable within 24-36 months. This requires making this area a priority issue and a break from the old attitudes, excuses and methodologies of recent years (see answer to question 1). Successes abroad can serve as templates for our projects.
One area where we could make a rapid start would be primary education. Currently we are actively strengthening existing monopolies via this sector with public money. If by 2011/12 the first two years of primary school use open systems and then a higher class is switched each year, The Netherlands will have the first generation of citizens who are trained in vendor-neutral systems entering the workforce in 12 years, easily capable of working with multiple systems and applications. De ‘Rosa Boekdrukker’ primary school in Amsterdam clearly shows how this can be done.
Dutch hospitals in The Netherlands could follow the example of the Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein. Many other hospitals can share in this success. And because it’s already been shown to work, the risks and costs for the next 100 hospitals are much lower.
It will take at least a decade before the full potential of open source and open standards can be utilised.
“Go out on the limb, that’s where the fruit is”
5. Beyond the cost, what other advantages, disadvantages, risks and opportunities should the Court of Audit factor in? What conditions must be met to make possible the implementation of open standards and open source software?
Benefits & Opportunities
- Savings of billions per year in direct costs for all citizens and IT-using organisations in The Netherlands.
- Redirecting a stream of funds from Ireland / USA into Dutch society as a huge and permanent investment in our knowledge economy.
- Government investment in software will result in free, reusable software and knowledge available to our whole society, rather than controlled by privately-owned and usually foreign companies.
- Security is strengthened through greater diversity of IT, competition, and the possibility of custom code audits.
- National sovereignty is reinforced when the government has complete control over its systems.
- General IT competence will dramatically improve, ensuring fewer spectacular and expensive failures such as the 2006 ‘Walvis’ Tax project, national medical records, public transit chip cards and, most recently, the new police system to name but a few.
Disadvantages and risks
- The current, fragmented IT policy of the Dutch government means that a thousand little fiefdoms may need to be broken up.
- The apparent lack of skills amongst IT management may have consequences for personnel. No doubt there will be resistance.
- Significant investment is probably needed in re-training government IT professionals.
- Angry phone calls from Washington DC when the flow of licensing money is shut off.
Preconditions
- See answers to question 1.
- Be realistic about the positioning and motivation of software companies. Companies seek to maximise profits, control markets and will therefore exploit any leeway that the government offers them. We do not invite the turkey to discuss the Christmas dinner. Therefore why do we accept “advice” from software companies and their interest groups about the best software strategy?
- We need to break away from the idea that extensive outsourcing is necessary, effective or desirable. The raison d’etre of government is to justly serve the legitimate needs of its citizens; it should therefore have detailed and inherent control over information systems. Stop the corporate-speak and ‘playing business’ by civil servants. Government is not a business, nor should it pretend to be. Outsourcing the control of information processing systems is contrary to the very principles of a democratic state for exactly the same reasons that outsourcing the military forces or the judiciary would be.
- Make a clear distinction between political and administrative goals and the means of achieving them. Cutting costs can be realised in many ways, regaining national sovereignty in only one.
- As long as desktop projects implemented under the guise of “efficiency through economy-of-scale” result in each desktop costing 6600,- Euros per annum, this kind of bullshit-bingo is completely risible. Keep IT managers and other decision makers who don’t know the difference between desktop-standards and a "standard-desktop" away from such projects.
Cloud computing, from the frying pan into the fire
In a recent column (Dutch), Frank Benneker of Amsterdam University explored the consequences of the rapidly growing use of cloud computing. The shift of computer applications from PCs and servers to a single "service" provided through a worldwide network is probably as fundamental a shift as the earlier one from mainframe computing to PCs.
Given the objectives of the Dutch Open standards and interoperability policy plan, cloud computing seems the quick and easy-to-implement solution: I hear Web 2.0 enthusiasts say “put everything on Google Docs and we are all interoperable”. But just as in the case of the "liberation" of PCs from mainframe managers/suppliers, there are problems with cloud computing – potential snakes in the grass.
In December 2004 the Dutch government decided that the dependency on dominant software providers was a problem and had to be addressed. The Dutch action plan from 2007 was the first, tentative step in dealing with this.
The Dutch government wants to use open standards for interoperability, and open source to foster independence, lower costs and strengthen local development (services instead of licences). Open standards are fundamentally essential for interoperability. The Dutch ‘standard’ government desktop plan demonstrates to governments that interoperability can also be achieved with an imposed, top-down mono-culture. Give everyone the same software, and information can be conveniently exchanged.
However, the price of a mono-culture is high, both directly in money and in less quantifiable aspects such as security problems and an extreme dependence on a few foreign private companies. The latter is especially difficult to reconcile with the idea of a sovereign nation and a government that is democratically accountable. Surely our governments would wish to avoid relying on foreign companies to control the connectivity of our information databases in some nebulous “computer cloud”?
The crucial point is that even in this cloud, the hardware does not belong to the government nor is it possibly even on Dutch soil. The hardware can be located anywhere in the world, and therefore subject to multiple legal regimes beyond the Dutch government’s control (or indeed, accountability).
Much of the Web 2.0 knowledge for the Dutch government and discussions about this are held on ning.com servers, and the consensus is that it would be pretty difficult to migrate away from there. Even NOiV, the Dutch open standards and opensource implementation bureau also holds regular discussions on LinkedIn instead of its own XWiki environment. It is only natural that people use what they know. However, bearing in mind not only the objectives of the Policy Document, but also the various Parliamentary Motions on the subject and the earlier decisions of the government itself, cloud computing is a major IT problem. To expect cloud computing to rid us of the issue of “lock-in” that has been a problem for the last 20 years creates a classic example of ‘out of the frying pan; into the fire ‘.
Our current problems arise from not foreseeing the long-term consequences of our IT choices. We need a separate government IT programme to ensure the freedom of choice that we see as entirely natural in other markets. Unless the cloud computing servers are on Dutch soil and we have access to the code under an open source licence, we shall only go from bad to worse.
The Free Software Foundation has the solution for these problems, a distributed cloud that we can all access. Servers that provide free software designed to guarantee our digital freedom. After all, this is the original intention of the Internet: all equal players in their own cloud.
