Kraftwerk and SAP digital licenses
Following Florian Schneider passing away, we looked at Kraftwerk and SAP digital innovators.
Shai Agassi, CTO SAP, spoke at the Churchill Club in 2005 on open source and concluded that some type of new digital license will need to emerge to complete the transition of enterprise software applications in the cloud. https://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/SAP_DE/S051111A.pdf
Kraftwerk and the music industry have largely adopted new digital licenses for distribution and compensation. Apple’s iTunes runs on hyperscalers. https://music.apple.com/us/artist/kraftwerk/553899
Soundcloud and other digital music services also run on Hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, GCP, offer https://soundcloud.com/search?q=kraftwerk
In order to develop a usage-based computing license so that customers only pay for what they use and SAP is compensated for that usage. Let’s pop the stack and compare Kraftwerk and SAP digital licenses.
Analysis between music and business applications points toward the future of digital licenses based on streaming usage. This points toward owning the application layer requires separation of functionality from security in order to rearrange security to deal with indirect access. Den Howlett at Diginomica has covered indirect access and SAP’s current solutions to data usage. https://diginomica.com/sap-indirect-access-new-policies-aid-transparency-users-remain-uncertain
Another issue to consider is data security. After Google released the Bigtable paper in 2006, followed by Amazon with the DynamoDB paper in 2007, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin paper in 2008. From then onwards much research, innovation, and collaboration in business databases for marketplaces, even in the enterprise has been in blockchain technologies. Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) span the transfer of value and other assets and address the privacy and confidentiality of computer insecurity by solving data security with permissions. This involves far more granular controls over data because access functionality flows with permissioned data and this is required by businesses moving ever faster at scale without breaking things.
Pioneers Kraftwerk and SAP are harbingers, with a composition of the technologies needed to align before changes to digital licensing. Business applications are far more complex, ABAP can’t simply be digitized like music. Although many ERP codebases have been lifted into the cloud, without the benefit of new programming languages designed for memory security Leaving existing codebases without genuine memory safety, they fail on storage reclamation, i.e., they have fatal use-after-free bugs. This can make them easy to attack in multiparty applications. New programming languages and patterns such as CQRS and event sourcing using Rust, has just arrived in time for digital transitions. https://doc.rust-cqrs.org/
In future a post it will be interesting to explore blockchain technologies and options to address indirect access in complex SAP business applications. Digital licenses in business applications seem likely to change, as the music industry and cloud computing have changed to digital licenses for consumption-based computing.
Next, we’ll look at Kraftwerk and SAP digital leaders
— Clive Boulton (@iC)
