In the extreme case that would allow amazon to steal code from customers and put that as a part of a customers currently running services, thus washing away the legal restrictions that copyright, patents and trademarks would otherwise create. I doubt that it would happen in practice since its a bit obvious scheme which would disregard authors intent of using AWS, and judges seems to have a history of following authors intent rather than legal loopholes.
AWS' terms basically come down to "if you use AWS, you lose the right to patent-troll AWS". The article is trying to spin it as "OH NOES NOW YOU GET TEH VIRAL FROM THE EEEEEEEEEEVIL GPL", though I have no idea on what theory they would base a claim that agreeing not to assert against Amazon and its contractors/vendors would somehow constitute GPL'ing your own code.
The article's open source point is perhaps a bit tendentious (or underexplained), but, contrary to the impression you convey, it is only a very small part of the article. The bulk of the article raises entirely real issues.
Edit: I think the open source issue is this: if an AWS customer uses open source software (or, more simply, if an OSS project is hosted on OSS) how far up the user/employer/vendor/contributor chain does the non-assert clause reach? If I contribute to project X, which is hosted on AWS, do I become a party to the non-assert clause? What about my employer? What if I contribute to the project as part of my employment? I think this concern is probably not too significant (particularly since it only bars someone from asserting a claim related to the AWS service used), but I don't think it's fair to call this FUD, much less to call the whole article FUD because it includes this as an ancillary point.
That seems exceedingly broad.
As to the FUD:
Conflict of interest. Former Patent Chief at MSFT putting an article out on Legal Issues for the #1 Cloud Provider, and MSFT Competitor, Amazon.
Wonder how much MSFT stock the Author is holding?
In other words if Amazon stole something and you use it, you can't go after another client of Amazon's for using that service.
If however they also infringed on you, you could, as you aren't going after them for using the service.
(Note that IANAL so my understanding my be incorrect)
I've built an application on AWS but would not have if this meant handing over all my IP to Amazon.
I must be misunderstanding the issue as I doubt any company or person would use AWS if it meant giving up their entire IP.
Can someone please explain what I am missing here?