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.
Cloud Computing is Web Hosting Gone Wild (Score:2, Interesting)
It's very very rare that I'd agree with Richard Stallman since his "user community" agenda is rarely in line with real freedom for developers (unfortunately Stallman favors users over developers), but this time I'd have to agree with him about cloud computing and the dependencies it creates for people, projects and companies "hosted" in the cloud.
Cloud computing is web hosting gone wild on steroids... however every company or software system that you rely on is another dependency that could cause problems for you down the road. Be careful which systems you use in your magical web app built upon cloud computing systems... a house is only as solid as the strength of the cards (infrastructure) it rests on...
he's right, but he's also wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
He is right that cloud computing is a potential threat to the progress we have made on free software, open standards, etc. However, he's wrong that it's marketing hype. Being able to move noisy, power-hungry hardware somewhere else and have other people deal with repairing and replacing it is a big win.
Fortunately, since a lot of cloud computing uses virtual machines, you do get full control and it ends up being not so much of a threat to free software. If anything, FOSS is a natural match to virtual machines, in the cloud or elsewhere.
Re:Totally agree (Score:4, Interesting)
I am in disbelief over anyones the acceptance of the idea. Relinquishing control over your data to an outside source seems unfathomably retarded, no matter what kind of spin is put on it.
I am thinking that your problem is both immaturity and the assumption that cloud computing is supposed to replace everything. Well, it's not. No, it's not supposed to replace those applications where you put in your credit card info or social security number (whatever the hell that is). It might claim that it can but why would you do that?
Brace yourself but there are in fact applications for things like ec2 [amazon.com] from Amazon. What if I wanted to design an informative website that might provide details and directions to a brick & mortar store while at the same time store comments from users?
I'm not putting any spin on this, I'm just pointing out that Cloud Computing has a place. It might be smaller than what the companies tell us, it might be larger than what we think. But to outright rule out a potentially cheap, distributed, robust service like this as a developer is really really closed minded. I'm personally willing to give it a chance as I build on open source frameworks and have a lot of applications I would like to toy with that don't deal in sensitive data. And I don't have a whole lot of change laying around to do it!
yeah he's right (Score:5, Interesting)
Businesses want to make money. The trend is business thinking is "why sell them something when we can rent it to them and keep charging them indefinitely."
RMS hits it right on when he says web-based applications are really an effort to change the market so that every computing function is on a pay per use or subscription basis. Look at itunes DRM if you want to see the future of "cloud computing"
It's all marketing.
As an aside, from TFA:
I was amused that the writer of an article about how "cloud computing" is hype used another one of those hype buzzwords that have no concrete meaning whatsoever..."web 2.0"...
Re:Shades of Gray (Score:3, Interesting)
cloud computing in nothing more than managed colocation services. or sophisticated hosting services..
coming up with another name for it, is silly, it is marketing, yeah they're using the hosting to allow some people to put their own data up on the internet, but most of the 'cloud' computing services are just managed colo services, with an interface to manage your servers and database etc.
i mean, there is nothing wrong with say using colocation services to let people put up their own content, but giving it a new fancy name, and trying to market it as something separate is fundamentally silly.
Re:Totally agree (Score:3, Interesting)
I have three copies of my gmail going at any one time.
a pop3 download only to my main computer, which is regularly backed up onto another Hard drive.
an imap synced with my iphone,
and googles copy.
If google closes it down, and my iphone goes stupid, I still have a full copy of my email, and a full backup copy of that.
to lose my email I would have to burn down my house with my iphone in it on the same day google shuts down forever. and trust me the last thing on my mind if my home burned down would be my emails.
Re:Dear RMS (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now all the "cloud computing" I do is free: I use windows Live services, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Notebook. Having these things online and accessible from anywhere is a great convenience and I'm almost always connected to the net anyway so it makes sense for me to use them.
BUT, If they ever think they are going to get a dime from me for these things they are wrong. Offline and free alternatives still exist and will exist forever, I don't need to use these "cloud computing" services. I only use them now because they are free. I even remove the ads on Live and Gmail so they really are making ZERO revenue from me beyond the value of the data they can mine--and they can go right ahead since the whole point of that is to show me targeted ads which, imagine that, I'm never going to see.
Re:Dear RMS (Score:5, Interesting)
Free software could allow you to encrypt your data automatically from the service provider, to migrate yourself and your data to a compatible competitor, or to implement "premium" features yourself. But what's in it for the service provider?
Re:Totally agree (Score:2, Interesting)
What reality are you living in that there are not hilarious court cases?
Canada?
Re:Dear RMS (Score:4, Interesting)
Gmail's popular because it's free. Try monetising it.
Like Google's already done, with the ads, and the premium accounts?
If you charge less, you're eating your desktop division's lunch.
If you don't have a desktop division, that means you're eating your competition's desktop division's lunch.
If you charge more, you're providing less service for more money, because the company ultimately doesn't own its data.
That assumes an identical featureset.
Consider Exchange vs Google Apps.
Exchange is going to have tighter integration with desktop apps like MS Office, and Office has more features and better support for legacy formats. It's also very likely you do backup inhouse, which may be required by your industry, and is probably going to give you more peace of mind. And it's not dependent on any third party, save for Microsoft, and there only for updates -- if Microsoft.com went down, your exchange server would still be up.
Google Apps has tighter integration with Google services, and, generally, better functionality for sharing documents and collaborating online. It has the additional advantage of outsourcing backup (Google can do it) and distribution (none needed), while being available anywhere. And depending on what you need in the way of desktop hardware, it's entirely possible you might not need any desktop software besides a browser -- which gives you many of the maintenance advantages of thin clients.
It is, in other words, apples and oranges. For some, Google Apps is a compelling alternative -- even worth paying for, possibly worth paying more for.
Re:This is what Privacy Policies are for (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, in Gmail's case, you can use POP3 and store a copy locally.
You can, but do you? How many people do this? And that's just gmail, which is just glorified webmail.
A lot of the stuff going on with 'cloud computing' isn't piggybacking on decades old standards, and has no real fallbacks.
How do you back up your facebook content?
Not really; it's either one or the other, or a split of both. You can't have legal currency stored under your mattress while still having it in the bank at the same time; if you could, you'd be able to just continually withdraw as much as you'd ever need.
Right, that's what makes your DATA different. With DATA you CAN have it in multiple places at once. You can have it under your mattress and in the cloud at the same time... in theory at least. In practice its rarely that easy.
I agree that without a backup there is a risk, but it's not the world-ending thing that RMS makes it out to be.
What good is the 'freedom' to do what you want with your software and your data if you subscribe to someone elses software, and give them control over your data?
Imagine a world with strong protections over real property rights, but everyone has been convinced to live in hotels where the property isn't yours so the rights don't apply, at least not to you.
Re:Dear RMS (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I've seen, the only people using Google are kids who don't know that it is not the email service but rather they, the email user, that is the product. A product Google sells to advertisters, marketers, etc.
Hey, it's fine for your personal email, and they have an $$ Enterprise edition that just barely doesn't suck compared to their competitors, and they are fighting the good fight against wireless so maybe thank god we can get stuff the Japanese and Europeans have had for years.
RMS is right, with the cloud it's just like any other hosted service. You are at the mercy of the provider. Personally, I like having my server with me and decide what it can or can't do. I can decide how vigorously I want to enforce the SLA, I can decide what type of processor, cooling, hard drive, etc. for my purposes. With the cloud, you are dependent on unreliable hardware that's supposedly magically made reliable because of redundancy. But guess what, if I drop a connection I drop a connection, regardless of how many servers I have waiting for me to reconnect to.
It's not paranoia driving this. RMS was around in the mainframe days when all computers were, you guessed it, a service. It sucked. IBM and Ma Bell ruled the world, and the only time you could play with a computer was at a university, and only for few minutes. Nowadays we depend on computers a lot more for our daily lives, banking, shopping, communications, etc. And to make the single point of failure AGAIN back to the network, which is and always will be the weakest link, is a bad idea. Better to write better standalone software that can tap in and extend itself. Why does everyone want everything controlled for them anyway? Isn't there any DIY spirit anymore? Beyond that it doesn't make sense to ride everything on your network connection, the one thing you will never have any control over.
Re:Dear RMS (Score:4, Interesting)
one thing i like about Gmail and Google in general is their stance that it's the user's data,
You're right about the exporting capabilities, but if you read your TOS you'll see that it's quite clear that anything that gets submitted there is Google's data. They haven't pressed this at any time I've seen, and their behavior patterns treat the data like it (mostly) belongs to the user, but that's not the actual legal state set forth.
Don't need gmail to access email everywhere (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Sorry but which email account can you NOT access from anywhere? I mean whether it's your ISP or your employer or your privately paid hosting, any half-decent email account provides IMAP over SSL so you can access it from anywhere. Most also have a web interface if you're at an internet cafe which doesn't provide any email client for you, and you're not tech savvy enough to get around restrictions and run your own client without admin rights.
Re:Mod Parent Up!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, seen him in person this summer, Stallman is as clean as the next hacker... oh wait. Seriously, he's clean.
And he is mostly right. Cloud computing is a trap UNLESS your local machine is a dedicated local node of the cloud that can work stand alone, communicating with free protocols and free software, form a competing cloud and so on. That is, if you can say bye to the cloud service without experiencing any loss of time and data.
BTW are there such web2.1 services around?
Re:Dear RMS (Score:5, Interesting)
I do thank RMS for the many contributions he's made to the free software movement. It is probably true that if it hadn't been him, it would have been someone, but the fact is that he's done a lot. It's also true that he is a zealot who does as much to hurt his cause as he does to help it. He seems determined to piss off the creator of one of his license's most successful products, He publishes screeds against anyone who disagrees with him, he refuses to compromise in any way, and he talks down to the people he is trying to convince. Surely he must realize that cordial public relations with your allies is a good thing? That sometimes compromise and "baby steps" toward a goal are more valuable than no progress at all?
RMS is attempting to solve a problem which has technical, philosophical, and social components. Having a superior technical and philosophical argument are only half the battle. The rest involves convincing people, a lot of people, many of whom have minimal understanding of either the technical or philosophical underpinnings of the situation, that he is right. He has proven to be consistently bad at this. At best you can say that he has won over a percentage (though not all, or even most) of those most able to fully appreciate all facets of his argument. He's made no inroads at all with people who aren't "geeks" and frequently annoys or seems to work against even those who support his ideals.
The man has his good points. He's done some really good things. He's also one of his own worst enemies. It never killed anyone to be nice and it certainly never hurt someone who claims to be working for social change to, you know, be social. If he is really incapable of being polite and politic, if he is really unable to bring himself to cut his hair, trim his beard, and wear some nice, well pressed clothes, than surely he can find a person in the FSF to be his voice and his face so he can sit in his dark little room writing code and manifestos?
Re:Sig Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
That's exactly what liberal politicians want you to think, so they can gain power over you. "You're just a helpless weakling with no control over your future, destined to be a wage slave the rest of your life, so let us help you out". The whole idea is bullshit. The truth is, every rich person started out poor at some point. Somewhere in the family tree of every "rich" family is somebody who started off poor and worked their asses off to get rich.
Look at Barrack Obama. He loves telling people how hard it is to make it in America. How the deck is stacked against the poor. How "mean" everybody is. How he started off on the south side of Chicago, a poor "community organizer". If things were really anywhere near as bad as he says, he never could have become a rich US senator running for president. Yet there he is. Care to explain?
But my family *has* made it from very poor beginnings. At one point everything my parents owned fit in a small car. And that includes my sisters and I. The very fact that I'm able to have this conversation with you is proof that your "the poor are helpless" argument is bullshit.
The biggest problem for the poor are the people like you breaking their spirits, telling them they're hopeless and destined to have crappy lives. You should be ashamed.