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Stallman Says Cloud Computing Is a Trap
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'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.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.)
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.