Stallman Says Cloud Computing Is a Trap 621
stevedcc writes in to tell us about an interview with RMS in The Guardian, in which he gives his views on cloud computing, with a particular focus on user access to data and the sacrifices made for convenience. "'It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign,' he told The Guardian. 'Somebody is saying this is inevitable — and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.'" Computerworld has a summary of some of the blogosphere's reaction to RMS's position.
I actually agree with RMS (Score:5, Informative)
I'm actually giving a presentation on this in a couple weeks at an academic conference on innovation. "Cloud Computing" had another name in the 1970's, Time Share. Ask folks how well that worked back in the day. Two years ago I did a consulting gig at a Medical Supply company that was still running their inventory and billing off a 486 with DOS, I kid you not. Fortunately their software vender was still around and did offer an upgrade route, but they were pushing to use their new online based system. We shopped around at a few other medical software companies who were pushing the same thing.
The owners of the business were in their 50's and 60's. They were savvy enough with the computers, but everything kept coming back to what would happen to their data. End of the day, they would not trust their business data to an outside vender, period. And for good reason dealing with HIPPA and other privacy considerations. The only way out for the data is a modem that is used to connect to the state's electronic billing system for public aid & medicare and that's it. Not internet connection to the server or the workstations that connect to it.
I work around a college town with several folks who are on the cutting edge. I just built online ordering system for another company that is hosted off a dedicated server. Every day the interns came in, the first thing out of their mouths were, "Why don't you just use Amazon?"
My short answer was, "I know how this will scale. If it gets hammered, add more servers, load balance it out, and cluster the database when it comes time. I've done it before and it will work. And until something better comes along and is proven, stick with what you know."
Most smaller businesses I chat with are not comfortable with the idea of other people hosting their critical data. Basically my conference topic is that we'll see something close to the Adobe Air model where applications can run either online or from the web in some type of VM and enable users to still save their work locally. Whether that be a hard drive or USB thumb drive. No matter how cool a web app is, if I can't run it while I'm not connected and can't save data to my local machine, it is not going to replace traditional desktop apps anytime soon.
Re:Totally agree (Score:5, Informative)
True. But riddle me this: when you get up tomorrow and go to sign in to GMail and all you get is a single page saying "Due to financial constraints and an inability to derive revenue from GMail to pay our bills, we have regretfully been forced to terminate the service.", where are your game serial numbers now and how do you plan on getting at them? I know it seems unlikely Google would just drop a service like that. Except that, well, they already have [blogspot.com].
Gmail allows you to download your email via pop3 and imap. You can also set it to automatically all email to another account. There is no excuse not to have a backup of all your Gmail mail. This "it might suddenly vanish" argument is a strawman.
Re:Totally agree (Score:4, Informative)
You can backup your mail from GMail using IMAP (or POP3 earlier).
I do this about once a year and store backups on archive-quality DVDs in my nearby bank :)
Re:Someone has to administer it (Score:5, Informative)
There's a big difference between having someone else host your website, and having someone else host your word processor.
For a website, the whole idea is that you want to share your data with the world. If someone at your web provider looks at your web site source code, what secrets are they going to learn? None. If they try to hold your data hostage, hopefully you've kept a copy locally (what idiot wouldn't?), so you can just move your hosting somewhere else. What's more, there's no performance problems since everyone is using the web to access your web page anyway.
Having someone host your word processor (or worse, your tax preparation or accounting software), OTOH, is sheer idiocy. First, the performance is going to suck if it's running on a remote machine rather than your own. (And if it's architected to mostly run locally and save data remotely, then why bother with remote hosting?) Second, your private data is being stored someplace where you have little control over it. Why would you want that? I don't know about you, but I do keep private and confidential data on my computer which I'd rather not have publicly accessible. Plus, if there's only one copy of that data, and you don't have it, it would be easy for the hosting company to hold your data hostage.
When Stallman blasted "cloud computing", I'm fairly certain he wasn't referring to website hosting.
As for Gmail and other web-based email services, that's a bit of a compromise. Many people like or need to be able to access their email from different locations and computers (at home, at work, on their iphone, etc.). Web-based email makes that pretty easy. There's definitely a performance hit (but maybe not compared to Outlook...), and there's a disadvantage in having your data not stored on your own computer, but the remote-access aspect for many people more than makes up for that. Unfortunately, for most people, there's no easy way to remotely access their home machines and run their email clients there, so we use webmail. (Even if you're a Linux user like me, it may not be possible to access your home computer; for instance, my workplace won't allow me to do remote SSH connections outside the corporate intranet, so even though I use Linux both at home and at work, I can't access my home computer from work to remotely run applications using SSH forwarding.)
Re:Dear RMS (Score:3, Informative)
Brilliant!
Re:'blogosphere'? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dear RMS (Score:1, Informative)
And that we can thank our Dear RMS for.
Where [openbsd.org] do you get this "we" [freebsd.org] crap white [netbsd.org] boy?
Re:RMS is still more lucid than most of you (Score:2, Informative)
You put your money in a bank and trust that they're gonna give it back when you ask for it.
I trust that they'll give me my money back because they're a heavily regulated industry with a lot to lose if they don't. A "cloud computing" business has nothing to lose except your business.
You pay a cable company to provide you internet, and trust that none of their techs are reading your email.
Really? I have an idea how easy it would be for them, so no - I don't trust that my ISP is not reading my email. My internet comes from a phone company, not a cable company, and most of them have already wiretapped phones (and got away with it) so why wouldn't they read my email?
You use your credit/debit card at countless businesses, and trust a whole chain of people not to swipe your card number.
But if any of these people misuse my card, I have some legal recourse - and my liability is limited to $50. On the other hand, if I keep my businesses customer communications in my GMail, and then Google stops offering it, I could potential lose thousands of dollars and, here's the biggie, have no recourse.
Re:Dear RMS (Score:2, Informative)
Your stupid reason is somewhat worse than his insane one. RMS defeats you again.
Re:You seem to contradict yourself and my memory. (Score:3, Informative)
In any case, it's hard to reconcile your praise of RMS's ACM Emacs brilliance with saying, "His MO when writing code is to create a giant steaming pile of crap and then depend on others to fix the problems and maintain it."
I know you are also twitter, but that does not matter.
The paper was brilliant. Full featured computer programming languages as extension languages for applications *are* a brilliant invention and how many billions of dollars has Microsoft made from copying it? Give me a couple of weeks to get my references down and some spare time and I think I'll write in my journal about that. The world needs to know.
I was terrified of the implications of Gnus 5 accidentally executing code, especially after finding stack overrun errors in the XEmacs 19.14 base code I inherited and kept a careful watch over what larsi was doing, though being the sharp guy he is, did his usual brilliant job.
If you cannot find a link with regards to Richard asking someone else to finish a crop coding job, feel free to contact me offline and I can put you in contact with someone who knows where the links are. It's like a multiple offense, but Richard naturally does development behind closed doors so it's not as easy to find the dirt as it with other Open Source software projects and people.
Oh, and the dirtiest thing I did in XEmacs development was to unilaterally decide that all the comments in XEmacs calling Richard Stallman an idiot and worse should be removed and did so without telling anyone. The changes were captured in posted diffs and CVS so I got "caught".
I regret doing that in a way, but not really. Personal attacks in source code just do not have a place.
No one owns GPL'd software. Assigning it to the FSF simply gives the FSF the ability to fight on your behalf.
And if we don't want or need anyone to fight "on our behalf"? Or about how Richard decided that manual changes could not move from Emacs to XEmacs, or XEmacs changes to Emacs without copyright assignment ...
For the first time (I've experienced divorce, hence war since then :-() someone declared war on me personally if I would not follow his dictation.
Re:Dear RMS (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not able to duplicate this either, and I just confirmed that I have "Show Password Hints" enabled. I normally display the username and password login window rather than a list of users, but changing that setting doesn't seem to matter either. I do not have a passport hint set, and I can't get Leopard to display my password in cleartext, despite trying to log in with incorrect passwords on 4+ consecutive attempts. While I'm sure Leopard has its share of security issues, this does not appear to be one of them.
I wouldn't normally post a response to what is probably a troll, but considering the parent is currently moderated at +3 Interesting and the only other response debunking this claim is from an AC, I felt the need to set the record straight.
Re:Dear RMS (Score:3, Informative)
You'll start respecting his opinion once he becomes someone else? That's honest to god retarded.