Slashdot Mirror
On Moving Toward Software Rentals
CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an article about the emergence of a service-oriented model of software delivery, supported by the W3C, IBM, HP, and Microsoft.
They already have their acronyms down: WSDL (Web Services Description Language), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and WSFL (Web Services Flow Language).
The article primarily covers the three phases of negotiating, ending with actual service delivery."
I, for one, am terrified of this. In the first, if you are only renting the software, you do not really own it, so they can basically monitor you, or refuse access to the software if they want. Second, they have to have some way to monitor if the software is working or not, depending on your subscription time, which means either every (SUBSCRIPTION TIME) you'll have to reregister and reenter your code, or they will need to have access to your system (via the network, or in the real world) to reactivate it. Scary.
I don't know what the hell this article is all about. Software as a service EXISTS ALREADY and has been around for years! Ever heard of web-applications? Like, say WEB MAIL?!?!
Thin client = web browser.
We run a subscription-based software service, over the web. As the net gets faster, latency goes down, and web-apps will become more and more like desktop apps. Sure desktop apps will always be a bit faster, but for many applications an HTML interface works just fine.
All these new acronyms are just a waste of time. The only thing it will achieve is a PhD for whoever the idiot is that worked on those specs.
The ACM Queue is an interesting publication. Every month they turn it over to a vendor to promote their latest scheme. It's a brilliant advertising vehicle, where the magazine *is* the advertisement. For example, an article in the May issue on the benefits of TCP offload engines written by iReady, makers of TCP offload engines. In the same issue, an article on why text mining is replacing information retrieval, from a company who would like to sell you text mining software. And that's just me flipping through the first issue I could find laying about my home. I think everything between the covers of the ACM Queue should be ignored.