Fair Principle 7: Contractual terms shall allow customers to use progressive or innovative technologies and deployment models.

Thanks to cloud computing, software-as-a-service and other concepts, digital technologies ensure that data can be made available to the user as a utility. A business model we know for years from the "traditional" utilities such as water, gas and electricity. 

The contractual terms and conditions of these traditional utilities are quite simple because everything revolves around a clear measurement of usage expressed in m³ for water and kWh for gas and electricity. With a digital utility such as data, however, it is more complex because the flow is bidirectional between provider and consumer while the different phases (processing, storage and transport of data) are constantly evolving. In addition, the costs of processing (expressed in FLOPS or MIPS), of storage (in Gbyte) and of transport (in Mbps) continue to decrease.  

Software terms and conditions are always based on underlying technologies. But, when underlying technologies progress faster than the software terms, a disconnection between the usage, now based on the advanced technology and the software terms is created. The software terms and related pricesstill refer to an old concept of calculating the required entitlement, while the new technology has progressed to a different concept. Vendors use terms and conditions in their favour if they can be interpreted in such a way that the customer needs incremental investment to cover the same functionality, while the technology allows for better use. So, instead of making cost decreases possible, software vendors use new technologies to make the customer pay more. This is only possible because of the lock-in experienced by customers. 

Therefore, our 7th principle is this: software terms should within reasonable timeframe adopt rules that give the benefit of technological progress to the customer. More granular and efficient management of compute resources should be recognized and supported by a vendor offering to run the software on such advanced technologies and allowing the customer to also reap the benefit.