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Where Do You Go When Google Locks You Out?
Lobais sends in the cautionary tale of a man who was locked out of Google Groups for three years — losing the ability to administer his own open source project in the process. "After about a year of using Google Groups for the PyChess project, I started [noticing] a problem. When I wrote mails to the list, no one would answer. And when I answered other peoples' post[s], they seamed to ignore them and press for new answers. As I tried to check the online group to see what was happening, I got a 403 Forbidden error. After a short while I realized that this error was given for any page on the groups.google.com subdomain. The lockout meant that I was unable to manage the PyChess mailing list. I was unable to fight increasing spam level, and more importantly I couldn't reply to anybody in my community. I wasn't even able to visit the Google help forums, which are all on groups.google.com. As the services are free of charge, I never really expected any support options. ... How can we know how often this kind of thing happens? If any admin can lock you out by a sloppy click, and give you no option to defend yourself, then it is bound to happen once in a while."
They don't care about your chess hobby. They don't care about you. Not Apple, not Google, not Microsoft, not Donner, not Blitzen. You're a number, a nothing. The cloud will swallow you whole.
Set up your own damn server.
Not quite, with the free support they didn't fix the issue - they took a year to tell him he'd broken the Terms of Service, and then no reply as to why. Even then, when trialling the paid-for support, they still managed to bill him when they shouldn't have.
As for not being news-worthy, how else can people highlight these kinds of issues?!
seems to be a common theme with free software and free services - it often starts out as the cheap option, but ends up costing more
And the evidence for that would be ... what?
i'm fine with people using free stuff, but seriously don't complain when it blows up in your face.
And how does complaining do you any good when commercial, expensive stuff blows up in your face? When Microsoft discontinues products? When Apple kills your app in their App Store? When DEC goes out of business? When Symbolics takes a research project, makes it proprietary, and then proceeds to kill it? Open source and free software were founded because commercial software had blown up in people's faces time and again. With open source, you at least have options for dealing with the problem, with proprietary software, you're stuck.
As for Google, if you want for-pay services, get a Google Apps domain. Those applications that you pay for are supported. And Google offers you the ability to download and backup your data so that you aren't stuck.
Even if you use the free services, so far, I have had a lot less trouble with free Google services than with any of the for-pay hosted web services I've used.
I think you've misunderstood the term 'Free Software'. The word 'Free' in Free Software is used to refer to *freedom*, not the cost.
So with software the situation is actually the other way round to the way you present it. If you are using Free(dom) Software, then you have the source and can do whatever you need with it and you aren't held hostage by someone else's actions. If you're using non-Free Software, *then* you seriously shouldn't complain when it blows up in your face.
Using non-Free Software (even if it's gratis) often starts out as the 'cheap option' -- not necessarily in terms of cost, but in terms of local knowledge and training and effort. But it often ends up costing more, because of its inherent limitations and because you can't actually *fix* it to meet your requirements, or even get bug-fixes for it without having to replace it wholesale with a new version.