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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 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.
Latency can be a problem. Speed of light and all that.
You also lose control and confidentiality.
None of RMS's concerns are related to the concept of "cloud" computing. His issues are with proprietary computing.
It's stupidity.
I'm not a big fan of black and white formats.
Nor am I a big fan of people who paint reality to be only black or white.
There are shades of gray.
For anyone to stand up and pronounce this as either 100% good or 100% bad is laughable. I'm certain Google & Amazon will/have found a completely viable and useful application for cloud computing--I mean unless I'm mistaken I think it's already working with Open Social. I'm sure it will have at the very least a niche application in computing. It might be very small, it might be very big. But to call it complete stupidity is quite ignorant.
'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.'
Uh oh, look at this! Oh no! Stupid stupid stupid! Just because businesses and proponents want it, doesn't necessarily make it evil or stupid. That's being shoved down my throat and self fulfilled prophecy and ... bad stuff ...
... we may have a candidate for cloud computing! Why not let some other company/people provide the cycles? Surely one could dream up some application even if it is merely a trivial/novel concept.
Furthermore, if the source code is GPL and the application is public and the data is not sensitive
My work here is dung.
If you dont like cloud computing dont participate in it. Theres no reason for us to argue about the matter.
Then dey get yer sugar, then dey get yer women, then dey get yer money!!! DONT DO IT!!!
For most users, the loss of control of there data and the other privacy issues that concern us arent really all that important. What matters to them is how easy the software is to use. Compare creating a gmail account to downloading and installing a normal mail client, setting up the pop / smtp servers and so on. In setting up a gmail account the hardest part is deciding on what your address should be (or reading the captcha). The trouble with most technical people is that they assume everyone else to be technical, when this is rarely the case. Hell I'm a programmer by trade and I cant even be bothered finding out how to put line breaks in my post!
No you missed part of the point of the statement which is that thats something data centers ALREADY DO for you and 'CLOUD COMPUTING' is just a fancy buzzword Amazon made up to sell their web interface for it.
The vast majority of computer users are not system administrators. For them, having someone -- whether it's the company administrator down the hall, or Google somewhere out there -- shepherd their data is a great reassurance.
99% of people don't host their own websites, so they depend on someone else to do it. Would Stallman say it's bad for those people to give that person or hosting company control over their data?
If there's one person in this industry who has been consistent over the years it's Richard Stallman. You may not agree with his views: that personal freedoms are more important than technical merit or convenience but you have to admit that he has never drifted from his what he believes in. He's also proven that he is willing to use real hard work (e.g., in the form of code) to promote the principles of his beliefs.
I think few people would realize how much different the computing world would be without the positive influence he's had on our industry.
Also, the record for many of his writings are pretty right on track. Just as an example: A decade ago the idea that you might need special "rights" in order to read a book might have been perceived as .. oh, what are the words people are using now? "raving" or "lunacy". Yet today Digital Restrictions Management embedded in eBooks, games and multi-media are a real thing -- and a real threat to personal freedoms.
Now, I'm just speaking for myself, but when RMS speaks, I will stop and read -- or listen (and be grateful I still have the freedoms to chose to do so) :-)
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
He says "Oracle's Ellison is selling cloud computing products and poking fun at his own marketing. Stallman is opposed to the cloud because he thinks it locks users into proprietary, non-open source software. Guess which one is a billionaire?"
Regardless of the merits of Stallman's views, that's just a fucking stupid statement. Like someone defending Rush Limbaugh's factual accuracy by pointing to his ratings.
Like someone rebutting concerns over monopolies by pointing out the existence of robber-barons.
This space available.
And I've known him for over 30 years. But just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, sometimes RMS is spot-on.
This is such a case.
For the cloud computing providers, the impetus behind the mad rush to cloud computing is first and foremost to lock users into a single provider. A secondary impetus is to give the provider unfettered access to all users' data.
What RMS doesn't mention, but of equal concern, are the disconnects between what the various players say, and what other players hear.
For example, cloud providers say "use our cloud, and you don't need to have an expensive IT department." IT department heads hear "use their cloud, and we don't need to have expensive IT engineers."
Cloud computing is potentially far worse than proprietary software since the cloud has much greater reach. Once anything is in the cloud, it is difficult to do things unless everything is in the cloud.
A company which is annoyed with Windows can add a Linux box to the mix, and gradually move stuff from Windows to Linux. With the cloud, it is all or none.
"web 2.0" actually has a pretty specific meaning now. A lot of terms that start out as "buzz word non-sense" end up being used for a very specific meaning.. it's one of the way new words enter the lexicon.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You probably should have saved your pity for an occasion when RMS wasn't right on the ball. He'll give you opportunities, trust me.
But cloud computing is a buzzword for a marketing campaign. It's the newest renaming of renting software as services.
Cloud computing sounds like some pie-in-the-sky bullshit if you ask me. Trust a third party with all my data? They go down and I'm screwed. Not to mention when they steal my data and then use it to compete against me, what then?
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."
Yeah, that's great -- until you leave the company, and leave the owners holding the bag. The bag, in this case, being a system that nobody knows how to maintain. This model works for a larger company, where you have a staff of sufficient size that turnover doesn't kill the knowledge pool. But for a small company, it's a disaster that happens over and over in this industry.
For a small company, it's absolutely a good idea to go with a service that can manage the whole thing for them. Sure, that service might disappear -- but with the right recovery schemes in place to change providers, that doesn't have to be a disaster. And it's generally a lot less probable than Mr. Key Man deciding to leave for greener pastures.
It's possible that in your instance, what you're doing makes sense. But honestly, you seem more like you're either a control freak that can't stand to let others in, or you're worried for your job.
For small companies, rolling your own hardware is insane. At least use a managed server farm like a Rackspace.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Look, I disagree with that smelly old hippy on a LOT of stuff. Most in fact. But on this he's actually right.
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."
I've also done it before -- too many times. I'd like to never do it again.
Racking servers, system administrations, colocation space, upstream providers, power, cooling, hardware purchasing -- it hurts to think about
EC2 and friends offer the application of economy of scale. Someone else worries about the problem, at a scale much larger than you can afford, and the savings get passed down to you.
It may not be "proven" enough for you yet, but I can't fathom how things can go anywhere *other* than API-driven on-demand server/network resource allocation. It is cheaper, easier, and you can use multiple providers to remove single points of failure.
So sure. You know how the old model works. Me too. I also know how to write assembly, but I sure as hell use a compiler when writing software.
At the end of the day, I want to be able to write software that allocates a new server. If that server fails, I want it taken out of the pool of available servers while my software starts up a new instance. Once a week, some NOC monkey can make a sweep of the server room, replacing hardware. Never again will I have to pay someone to head down to the colo to swap out a hard drive (or god forbid, go to that hell hole myself).
the only issue with your argument is that the standalone is always going to be there.
say in 15 years they have come so far with web apps and always connected that most people decied to use it isntead of the standalone.. the standalone is going to lose development.. or be poorly developed.. and therefor will not be there when they decied to start charging
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Just as actualization is saving my company lots of money today, I'm sure in the future cloud computing will do the same. To an extent, cloud computing for the big business is a natural extension of actualization. For the consumer, getting rid of their OS and depending fully on the web is likely a pipe dream.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Except, the market has already spoken. Services like Gmail are becoming more popular all the time. Browsers are all focusing on javascript speed at the moment for precisely this reason.
End-user cloud computing is being oversold. I doubt any of us will fully go to a web-os, but web-based apps become more important with every year, and are already so exceedingly popular that only a fool would dismiss them and call them gibberish, precisely like RMS did.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I would be willing to stake my Slashdot karma on the prediction that OpenOffice or a reasonable facsimile will always exist as a product I can download and run on my own hardware. E-mail, well I could always use my ISP for my e-mail or even running my own mail server isn't out of the question but the nature of e-mail is that it has to exist somewhere and for most people it's not practical to run their own mail server. And as long as I can still buy HDDs I'll never be reliant on Google or MS to access my photos, music, movies, or documents. Even if Windows eventually becomes nothing more than a thin client connecting to the MS mothership I'm sure I'll still be able to grab a Linux ISO and continue using a real operating system on my own hardware.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
About your second point: you accept "magic box" services every day of your life. You put your money in a bank and trust that they're gonna give it back when you ask for it. You pay a cable company to provide you internet, and trust that none of their techs are reading your email. You use your credit/debit card at countless businesses, and trust a whole chain of people not to swipe your card number.
If I was going to be paranoid about lack of transparency and control in paid services, there are a dozen other every day things I would be more worried about than my GMail account.
He's right that there are problems. His solution is what makes him sound like an irrational lunatic. Boycott all services that don't follow the FLOSS regime's decree! Idiocy. How about instead, we work with service providers like a semi-rational person would to get them to come in line with users privacy concerns. It's actually not that hard to come up with a solution that works for everybody once you kick all the raving nutters out of the room.
If you have not got the in-house skills or time to run your own IT department, then storing all your data in a clod can make a lot of sense.
CloudBiz does all your back ups, web hosting, ...
You, and your associates/sales reps/... can access your data on the road with no need to set up your own VPN servers etc.
Small business people want to focus on their businesses, not on setting up and maintaining IT. They don't service their own cars & delivery vans, so why should they run their own inhouse IT?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Of complaining about cloud computing by saying this:
'It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign
By saying this:
Computerworld has a summary of some of the blogosphere's reaction to RMS's position.
Emphasis mine.
Using one media driven piece of hype to denigrate another media driven piece of hype seems...well, silly to me.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Consider what's happening when DRM services for entertainment media are going away. Now consider what happens if a cloud service with your only copy of your critical data goes away.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You make a very well reasoned explanation of this.
Stallman is still a crackpot. A curious combination of fanatic, technologist, and luddite. :)
I don't know quite a lot about how food makes it to my dinner table. If it stopped working, society as we (ok, I, for those of you hand-cranking your OLPCs) would screech to a halt and massive starvation would ensue.
And yet, having everyone not only KNOW how to make their own food, but actually do it because the mega-farms, chemical producers, grocers and their massive supply chains might screw up is plainly stupid.
Yes, we create new technology. New business models. Some of them entail relying on the new technology and new business models. The choice is not between Stallman and the hallelujah choir. The choice is risk/benefit, like always.
Stallman is not part of the market for this service. His sky will perpetually be falling. I figured out years ago that I'm a market outlier. What I'm willing to buy has no real relation to the market as a whole. Stallman needs to learn this, or perhaps just the Slashdot crowd does. What Stallman finds objectionable is more or less irrelevant as far as the business world is concerned.
Who says you have to pay with money? You're paying with data about you. Google must know a lot about you by now.
But I would have just a bit of an easier time hearing what Stallman has to say about anything related to the internet if he actually used the internet, as in with a browser.
Gmail's popular because it's free. Try monetising it.
You can either charge less than a desktop solution, or more. If you charge less, you're eating your 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.
It's a lose-lose situation.
That's good, but a lot of people will trust the cloud to have its own redundancy system to protect their data, never thinking the cloud might betray their trust.
Also consider what would happen if the cloud were to leak your data, having it rain down on your competitors, or just one person inside the cloud with the ability to read your data and deciding its something the world should know (Palin e-mails). (Just because you don't use cloud services for sensitive communications doesn't mean others won't send them to your cloud.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
That's really the only valid concern I've read about the nature of cloud computing. I think the danger can be mitigated with common sense security measures (strong passwords) and a level of responsibility on the service provide to properly encrypt and store sensitive user information and data. It could also be said that there is already a risk of someone hacking my personal computer anyway, or just stealing it. Even if I don't use web e-mail or document storage my data could still leak out. The nature of the internet is a force multiplier for that threat, but it is not completely mitigated by taking your data offline.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Agreed. I absolutely cannot stand RMS and hate almost everything that he or the FSF says and do, but the fact that he also hates the cloud is something I can finally agree with him on. His reasons, though... It's the same tired argument about how we are shackled by the tyranny of evil corporations. I just think that applications written in Javascript running in a browser is idiotic.
I would be willing to stake my Slashdot karma on the prediction that OpenOffice or a reasonable facsimile will always exist as a product I can download and run on my own hardware. E-mail, well I could always use my ISP for my e-mail or even running my own mail server isn't out of the question but the nature of e-mail is that it has to exist somewhere and for most people it's not practical to run their own mail server. And as long as I can still buy HDDs I'll never be reliant on Google or MS to access my photos, music, movies, or documents. Even if Windows eventually becomes nothing more than a thin client connecting to the MS mothership I'm sure I'll still be able to grab a Linux ISO and continue using a real operating system on my own hardware.
And that we can thank our Dear RMS for.
Thanks papa bear.
Sean
and of course thousands of others, but we're talking about rms right now
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
I think the danger can be mitigated with common sense security measures
I see you've never provided front line tech support...
You're using her as bait, Master!
what about other remotely stored data like contact lists? and webmail isn't the only application for cloud-computing.
i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using cloud services per se, but it would be unwise to become over-reliant on them, especially for important/valuable or sensitive info. i mean, using cloud services to share data and for backup probably isn't what RMS is warning against.
one thing i like about Gmail and Google in general is their stance that it's the user's data, and they should be free to take it wherever they want, whenever they want. this attitude has ensured that Gmail, and other google service, users are given the option to export their stored data in an open format that can be easily imported by desktop applications or other web services.
so if Google goes out of business or they decide to charge for their end user services, i can take my data somewhere else. this gives me confidence that Google will protect user interests, and provides a form of insurance against service changes in the future.
but if a company like Thompson Reuters decided to offer a web service, i would not trust them with my data. their litigation against GMU has demonstrated that they are willing to lock users into their proprietary format. so if you were using an online collaboration tool developed by Thompson Reuters, and you wanted to take your project to another service or migrate to a desktop application, you probably wouldn't be allowed to export your data from their cloud service.
then there is the privacy issue. look at what Yahoo, and even Google, have done in the past to help the Chinese government root out political dissidents. look at how the telecoms have illegally encroached on customer privacy. can you honestly say that a world in which cloud-computing has replaced desktop applications is not something to worry about?
Actually I am not willing to bet anything on cloud computing. It is a marketing illusion, consumer electronic device with foss software will rule the day in terms of applications. Why the hell would anybody bother with those privacy invasive add spweing services, when they can simply plug in and run the own easy to configure consumer grade appliance server, running their own mail, web, media and file servers.
It really seems like idiot corporations go blind with greed, the delusion of being able to rent peoples data back to them, it all just totally ignores the reality and how server services have become more accessible and cheaper every year and, will continue to do so. It really is nothing more than hype, today's low cost technology attempting to solve yesterdays high cost server problems and for some inane reason they belief those low cost solution are only available to corporations to be rented to consumers with unlimited profit margins and will not become directly available to consumers at very low prices.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Because right now their videos don't stream very well on a home broadband line, their mail is full of spam, their website is a PITA to manage, they don't know how to setup DynDNS or even remember the wacko addresses it spits out, and their home systems have more security holes than Carter has little pills. (Hmm... might be showing my age on that last one.)
10 years ago, running your own mail server and web server was a highly effective solution. Far superior to anything else on the market. These days it's a fools errand. Services like GMail provide better service, faster access, greater usability, and lower cost. Why use anything else?
I'm sure the market will eventually shift back the other way as these things tend to come in cycles. (Anyone remember the various thin-client cycles?) But until the great pendulum of the market swings back, cloud computing is a superior service.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Right now all the "cloud computing" I do is free: I use windows Live services, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Notebook.
Absolutely none of that is Free.
You have the source for nothing. If they go away, you cannot continue to use them on your own server. If they lack a feature you would like you cannot improve on them.
"Cloud Computing" is simply commercial software delivered on-demand, with the same benefits and drawbacks.
In fact you're a little worse off because you can't even disassemble the server source to see how it works (possibly offset by the benefit of being able to more easily examine some of the UI code in browser based systems).
RMS is right about what happens if no-one truly owns software they use... I don't know that he's right about cloud computing in general because you can run your own truly Free software in the cloud... but software as services, he is right to issue warnings.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
he confused convenience for freedom.
The problem with this whole line of reasoning is this idea that one can't exist without the other -- or that by increasing one you must decrease the other. This kind of either-or, black-and-white thinking isn't constructive at all.
It's really about risk management. Do the gains provided by "X" outweigh the risk of some random "bad Y".
Can Google hold the data for ransom? Theoretically yes. Is it likely to happen? NOT AT ALL. Is Gmail likely to disappear tomorrow? NOT AT ALL. The risk that the OP's game codes are going to away are very, very remote. The odds that his hard drive with his game code file will crap itself and his backup just one awesome game too old is several orders of magnitude higher. For him, a risk analysis showed that Google is the better bet. Who are you to question him on how best to control his data?
We can come up with Doomsday scenarios all day long as a reason to stay in our bunkers (which, btw, is exactly what Stallman is proposing). However, such an absolutist attitude is just as foolhardy as those things he rants about.
The reality that is everyone needs to do a basic risk analysis and determine if the gains outweigh the risks and make their OWN decision on what's best for them. THAT is true freedom. Making blanket black-and-white statements and attempting to apply them to everyone and everyone's situation claiming that one way is the ONLY way is Stallman's "freedom", and not true freedom at all.
You could still potentially be hit with the inconvenience of being forced to switch back to locally run services (and getting your data back out of the cloud and onto your machine) at an inopportune moment like around a big project deadline or the week before exams at school (either that or be forced to pay for a few periods, until a more convenient time to move yourself off comes around). Then of course there is the privacy issue (although it could be argued that email is already not very private without additional third party plugins like Pretty Good Privacy or GNU Privacy Guard).
Finally, while many people admire and respect Mr. Stallman, he's never claimed to represent anyone.
While I seriously doubt that (that he's never claimed to represent anyone), it's possible. 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 from personal experience that he is a control freak. All "official sanctioned" GNU code is owned by him, by copyright assignment. It is not enough for software to be under the GPL. My only direct experience was a phone call right after I had taken over the job of Mr. XEmacs and he told me how he must "wage war" (direct quote) against me and XEmacs because even though we were true blue GPL, he must have FSF copyright assignment.
The Emacs source code which we inherited and forked is littered with 1000+ line functions, 6+ levels of nested if-else and assorted other crap that looks like it was being written to violate as many rules of good programming style as possible. The amount of time it took to get the code in a state where we could display CJK fonts in Emacs (and in a stable state) was staggering, especially considering that we were basing our work off the good folks' at ETL Mule.
I have no respect for the man, no respect for his (programming) work. I find the names Linux/GNU and worse GNU/Linux to be as childish and offensive as the children who like to write Micro$oft and M$ and similar crap. (You might as well also write "you can't spell gOatse without the Gates and a big O". It's equally as witty.) Anyone can develop userland tools. Only a handful of people, of which Richard is NOT one, can develop a successful kernel.
On the other hand, he wrote one of the most insightful and brilliant papers in ACM history describing the architecture of Emacs and he does deserve credit for initiating the GNU project, thus inspiring many folks including myself to publish our work and help out on other projects.
Of course, even you write insightful things from time to time. No one is completely good or bad.
If you really require someone to explain to you why then you have not the moral capacity to comprehend the answer.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
And that we can thank our Dear RMS for.
Thanks papa bear.
Indeed. I get very tired of all the denizens of the peanut gallery who start frothing at the mouth whenever RMS' name is even mentioned, as if he was some personal enemy to be abhorred and shunned.
In common with the probable majority of these people, I have never actually met the man, but I am capable of recognising that he has contributed more to Free and Open Source software than most us ever will.
It might be worth remembering that the next time Google decides it was only joking the last time they revoked an opressive and obnoxious license agreement. If your data is important to you, simple common-sense should indicate that putting it in someone else's hands is sheer folly. RMS is 100% on the money.
Awesome. Is that your way of saying "I don't know, that's just what I've always been told"?
Maybe not
* Note: assert(RMS == FSF) for some of these, I believe that's an entirely reasonable assumption.
RMS is right. Cloud computing is big business' push to turn what was a previously unacceptably democratic computing paradigm into one that can be controlled by only those players with enough funding to set up "clouds".
The migration away from mainframes in the 80s was supposed to avoid just the problem with massively centralized computing: I.e., the problem that centralized computing forces everyone to be doing the same thing or at very least, conforming to the same design parameters.
Personally, I like my PC. I don't want to be constrained to only doing things that can be done in "cloud space". Having an OS that I can do whatever I want on, in absolute privacy and not having to rely on corporate policy to be at least partially friendly to me is something that I value. I don't want Google, Yahoo or Facebook letting the government look over my shoulder, or their big corporate buddies using their data to shove ads down my throat. It also means that I can't just buy a computer and use it as much as I want for no extra cost. Now I have to pay Internet bills, plus whatever software service charges will be applicable in this new forthcoming cloud.
On another note, cloud computing makes it *impossible* for the masses to implement proper privacy policies or cryptography. You think it's hard at the moment to get people to use secure email? Try implementing privacy when everyone's using Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo.
So called SaaS/cloud computing is just a way to ensure that the big end of town gets to watch and control what everyone else is doing, and bill them by the month.
Thanks, but no thanks.
I hate printers.
not refreshing the page to communicate to the server.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well I think secret questions/password hints by definition are NOT proper security procedures.
That was my point.
I'm free to disregard the password hint option, and I could just bang my head against the keyboard and enter in random jibberish for my secret question that no one (not even me) would be able to guess.
You could, but we're also running into the overload issue. Of things I use every day, I'm looking at least a dozen, more likely a couple dozen potentially different passwords.
That's probably an underestimate because I've given up.
Sometimes it is OK to put all your eggs in one basket ... if you guard that basket with extraordinary care and I wish the DES card I have at work for VPN login could be used for other things.
I would not mind a much, much longer PIN and output string to type in for password if one DES card could be used to generate all my passwords.
The problem with anything approaching secure encryption is, what happens in the event of a disaster? You either err on the side of security, OK, so your town flooded during the night and you woke up when the water level reached the top of your bed, your encryption card under water and all your password protected encrypted stuff is gone forever. Or convenience.
I'm free to disregard the password hint option, and I could just bang my head against the keyboard and enter in random jibberish for my secret question that no one (not even me) would be able to guess.
Alas, many sites do not provide the opportunity for the user to enter their own question, restricting you to their set of questions which answers may be general knowledge (like maternal grandmother's maiden name or name of high school you graduated from) or even easily forgotten knowledge (why would I remember what my favorite color was in 8th grade?!). At best then you could enter gibberish for the answer (unless they only let you choose a favorite color from a predetermined palette which wouldn't surprise me but would irritate me).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
All your talking about is how it comes configured out of the box and how it is updated. As it is now, a lot of mid size ISPs already supply preconfigured net hardware and it would be a very small step for them to supply preconfigured server appliances which they could upgrade and manage on line.
The google image of cloud computing is really just crippled cloud computing, all hamstrung by pointing to one location, true cloud computing is truly distributed broadly across the whole internet and not locked to half a dozen locations. Service based ISP's provide the bridge between complex 'underlying' backend administration and simple user front end administration, which for even the simplest user could simply be handled remotely by their ISP.
It is really stupid to think that only the internet 'God' google and their acolytes the googlites can configure a appliance server and deliver it to the end user ready to go and safe to use ie. plug and play and even if the user is incapable of then they supply and install. Every computer manufacturer and every reasonable ISP can do it and make money selling it, not renting it (although that is an option and they avoid infrastructure hassles). Privacy is what the local suppliers will be able to sell, your own private server that you can access from anywhere, not some public billboard where perverse privacy invasive strangers pry into your daily digital habits and personal affairs and, try to jam an endless flood of psychologically targeted advertising into your private life, well, that's not really true, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but, only because you would no longer have a private digital life ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
First, Ellison doesn't like the Cloud because Amazon, Google, etc. buy off 10 of his best engineers and charge for services making expensive Oracle servers unnecessarily.. kind of like when Oracle forked Red Hat server that was their primary install base. Goes around doesn't it.
Look at the current industry. Microsoft is dominating with Xbox live, Apple with iTunes, Google with their search engine and service, Amazon with their book store and storage technology, Yahoo with web services... this is also the heart of Net Neutrality because telcos have cut off small users and now want rent from the big guys.
That said both Richard Stallman and Laurarance Lessing and Tim Berners-Lee all have a similar vibe going. We have Open Web Standards, Free Software and some Free Culture but connecting it is not free. Somebody else is collecting all the keys. The key feature of the Internet was that it was a network of PEERS.
The very first stratification was in the dial-up days when all of us users could only "read" the pages, not host our content. Only big players can play, little people have to rent from hosting companies. The telcos never let go of that, so for most businesses it's very expensive to get pipe capable of hosting to your business.
The second stratification was the creation of database driven web apps. Again, HTML directories were woefully behind, so programmers wrote programs to store and retrieve the data more easily. Now most data is tied up in databases... Wikipedia is awesome but you can't touch the actual database. You can't directly "tear off" a page as a document. The keeper of the database is the keeper of the knowledge. Some nice people share with APIs but that's only because they're nice, they don't have to make the data free.
Thirdly, the people like Amazon and Google are tying up not just their data but everybody's data. They mine all of it for advertising, they control all of your access. If you leave they still keep your stuff. If they lock you out you might not have it. Consider that the forefront of IP infringement cases are over what YOU can host on external sources, so the tools to create are more and more limited... the tools to host without being "signed" to the publishers are waning.
What would a web look like if we could all host? If when we connected to each other's websites we actually connected to each other. How would we create something like Google but not owned by anybody? How do we really have self publishing that rates good in searching. What does a search tool look like that connects documents, not databases?
Indeed. I get very tired of all the denizens of the peanut gallery who start frothing at the mouth whenever RMS' name is even mentioned, as if he was some personal enemy to be abhorred and shunned.
In common with the probable majority of these people, I have never actually met the man, but I am capable of recognising that he has contributed more to Free and Open Source software than most us ever will.
I have met him. Just the once at a programmer's society meeting where he was a guest speaker about 5 or 6 years ago. He brings the criticism on himself. No one really cares that he's eccentric and his hygiene isn't the best. They're just easy targets.
I asked him at the public q&a (after he'd done his Saint IGNUcius routine, complete with robe and halo): How do you counter claims that free software is more difficult to use than proprietary paid for software. He looked me up and down and said "Who says its hard to use" and turned away. It didn't help that I'd just come from work and was therefore the only person in the room wearing a suite. If I didn't know that he'd worked on Emacs and gdb, I'd have simply written him off as a flamboyant nut job.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
He looked me up and down and said "Who says its hard to use" and turned away.
Interesting. I wouldn't want to attempt to excuse his boorish behaviour, but the attitude sounds characteristic of someone who spends a disproportionate amount of time interacting with machines rather than people. This might also account for a certain tendency for correspondents on this forum to go up in flames and hurl abuse without provocation.
I too have met him, in a somewhat similiar setting as yours, and sure he's a bit weird and sure he looks like a hippie, but dangnabbit there is something absolutely impressive about a man who's taken a good long look at his beliefs, drawn them out to their logical conclusions and then acted from those conclusions.
I admire that, and while you and I and many others may think he acts weird and says strange stuff from time to time, if you look a bit deeper you'll see that he's almost inevitably consistent in his beliefs.
You can say what you will about the man, but I do sorrily miss that more people don't do what he has done: Analyze your beliefs and act accordingly.
As for your q&a experience: How many times do you reckon he's got that question? Since he uses free software exclusively, it might not even be a meaningful question for him.
Oh, and reducing his contribution to "worked on Emacs and gdb" is really disingenious. He's done far, far more than that for the community. Look it up.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
OK, you like your PC. You don't mind maintaining it, running anti-viruses and so on. But you're not everyone. A lot of people want their services managed. Other people might want a way to manage peaks in demand without buying server infrastructure for the rest of the time (one of the commonest uses of S3 seems to be companies putting their catalogue images on there).
In most walks of life, people are far more tolerant and understanding of other people's needs than software.
You don't meet guys building their own hot rod racer in their garage getting on their high horse to tell people with regular cars that they're giving up their freedom by not building their own cars, and how they're slaves to the auto makers. They understand that what they do is a rarity and most people want to get in, turn on the car and go to the shops.
When Stallman actually has a job where he gets paid for producing code for corporations, where he can't just wait for some open component so he can deliver what's required (how long has HURD been now?), I'll start respecting his opinion.
I have to side with RMS ... "what you're used to" != "easier to use".
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
i never said they will disappear.. they just will not be kept up in the development part to be on par with cloud solutions.
take maping and getting driving directions - there used to be (10 years ago) a slew of software packages for sale each with it's own way of doing things - with it's own set of features.. then came mapquest.. then google maps then live maps.. and they where free... made all the little software packages kinda pointless to an extent.
take MS's offerings for the PDA.. before the live maps.. pocket streets was by far one of the best mapping software for PDA's.. and it was expensive.. now if you can get wifi or if you have 3g on your pda you can just install live maps on it.. it gets updated is free and far more advanced than their current pocket streets is.. same company that has software in the same spot diffrent tech.. and they have already started to lag behind in dev of the standalone.
nothing is going to cause the standalone to "disappear" but as more and more people start using the net solutions they support for the development of the standalone is going to drop.. and there for the standalone isn't going to be able to keep up, sure you can drop back to it later.. but in 15 years there just might be some feature set that is only avaliable via net and there is no standalone solution for it, atleast that is of the same quality and usability.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Maintaining a PC is not as hard as you imply...
For you and me, you are correct - it really isn't all that hard if you devote even a little time. However, professionally (and personally) I am regularly called on to fix other people's computers and for many people it clearly is hard. There are many reasons why of course but it is unquestionably beyond the capabilities of many people.
Sometimes it's because they can't be bothered, sometimes they don't have the time, other times they are afraid of screwing something up, and frequently they simply don't know how. I often joke that knowing how to maintain a computer is a great way to seem smarter than I actually am. Fix a broken PC and people think you are some kind of tech wizard - whether you actually are or not.
Plus a lot of folks simply don't have the time even if they know how. As an analogy I'm quite capable of doing my own plumbing but I do it so seldom it is more efficient for me to hire someone else to fix problems when they arise. Likewise a lot of my clients can solve their own problems but they simply don't have the time so they hire me.
So yes there are problems with cloud applications but there are problems with locally hosted applications too. There is no free lunch, it's simply a question of what works best for your needs.