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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.