Enjoy the Disruption
Month
I just don’t understand WTF the Mozilla Foundation was thinking on this one. It’s akin to making someone a CEO who donated to segregation campaigns in the 1960s. You just wouldn’t do that.
Gay rights have not yet achieved the same acceptance as other civil rights have, but they will do so undoubtedly one day. And when that day arrives, and it already has in most of Mozilla’s fan base markets, it is going to haunt the Mozilla Foundation even more than the decision today is doing. Mozilla looks to the future in all it does, except when it comes to its leadership apparently. The future profile of CEOs will not have anti-LGBT beliefs, and Mozilla needs to be skating to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.
What is really troubling is that the origins of the tech industry, the West Coast tech, were about tolerance and civil rights. Personal computers and related technologies were about freedom from oppression. For a tech non-profit to install an anti-LGBT CEO is completely 180 from why and how tech evolved from its early days. Technology isn’t just about what you do, it’s also about who does it. They go hand in hand.
If this was simply an oversight that was missed in due diligence of the CEO’s past then OK, but make the change happen.
With Google announcing massive price drops (https://developers.google.com/storage/) it has a lot of developers and tech managers re-thinking the use of AWS, Rackspace, etc. Certainly the $.026/GB of monthly storage and lowered compute engine prices make stiff competition. I am not convinced yet, however.
First, depending on what one is trying to accomplish, the new bandwidth prices announced by Google are still more expensive than AWS once you reach a certain volume. For heavy bandwidth out users then, it may not make sense to use Google over AWS if pricing is your only concern.
A larger issue is one of trust, and opinion shows many developers and decision makers are in agreement with me on this one. Google has failed users and developers countless times as it has pulled its APIs and services. Google has a one year notification term for its cloud computing services, but that can change, and one year is possibly not enough time if your entire business is structured around the service. The fine details of the cloud computing terms of use with Google could also give one pause compared to AWS.
Further, AWS revenue accounts for ~7% of Amazon’s overall business revenue. In comparison, the Google cloud computing business brought in roughly 1.5% of Google’s overall 2013 revenue. That alone is enough to give me a second thought when considering trusting my business or computing needs with Google due to its lengthy history of pulling services.
There are of course other reasons to distrust Google, which I won’t go into now.
AWS is likely to follow Google and continue dropping its prices as well. So, any prudent decision-makers should take a wait-and-see approach before jumping ship. And even then make a careful analysis (including future growth scenarios) of how your business or process actually utilizes the various cloud services to determine the real and future costs involved.
The Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act (link) is doublespeak for “we’re actually going to limit Open Access.”
The FIRST Act is yet another bill that is winding its way through the US Congress that despite making claims FOR science will actually reduce the availability of Open Access. Luckily the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has clarified the damage that this bill would actually do to scientific advancement within the U.S. PLOS has done another writeup of the severe consequences this bill would bring.
In the past similar bills such as the RWA "Research Works Act" backed by the Association of American Publishers and many paywall publishers have used this doublespeak. The Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS), a publisher backed proposal, is another initiative filled with doublespeak, with the real aim to control access - not open it up. And more recently the “Access to Research” initiative from publishers does the opposite of what its title proclaims. It limits access to research in the digital age by adding a physical barrier and forcing you to travel hundreds of miles to a participating library instead of providing access in the convenience of your lab or home.
What really fascinates me, however, is the continued use of marketing doublespeak in these legacy publisher proposals to manufacture consent and distort the facts for financial gain. That they are pronounced with a straight face each time makes me just a little sick inside that people like this actually exist. The opposite of heroes, value creators, and leaders. If you haven’t noticed, these tactics grind my gears to the point of evoking a visceral emotional response.
Now I’ve looked to see who outside Congress is backing the FIRST Act by way of either public support or Congressional campaign donations and have yet to find a connection to the usual suspect publishers or associations. Please leave a comment if you do find a connection.
Update
As Björn Brembs points out, a number of paywall journals and publishers have donated to the Congressmen responsible for bringing the FIRST Act to the House of Reps. This is more than a smoking gun leading back to Elsevier, and a few other large publishers known for backing previous anti-OA bills.