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What's Needed For Freedom In the Cloud?

Posted by Soulskill on from the gumption-and-a-sturdy-parachute dept.

jrepin writes "Georg Greve from Free Software Foundation Europe has often been asked to explain what he considers necessary prerequisites for an open, free, sustainable approach toward what is often called 'The Cloud,' or also 'Software as a Service.' He gives 7 ingredients that are necessary for freedom in the cloud. For example, 'it should be illegal to change privacy policies on users without their explicit consent. They need to know what is changing, and how, and what will be the resulting level of privacy they enjoy – in the same clear, transparent and understandable manner.'"

4 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Don't use cloud. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's all you need for freedom..

  2. Competition and easy transfers by artor3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There needs to be lots of choices for users, and an easy, free way to transfer all data from one company to another. Otherwise all the disclosure in the world is meaningless, since they can hold your data hostage to make you accept their new terms.

  3. Re:"The Cloud" is just ... by camperdave · · Score: 5, Funny

    Like any cloud, it will soon vanish, never to be seen again.

    Judging from the "Error establishing a database connection" message I'm getting, the cloud is already gone.

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  4. Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.

    The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.

    And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.

    My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.