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Is AT&T Building the Ultimate Walled Garden?
itwbennett writes "The announcement earlier this week that AT&T joined OpenStack was greeted with much fanfare (of the 'woo hoo for open source' variety). But dig into why AT&T decided to sign up for OpenStack and things get a lot more interesting. 'AT&T is about to take on Amazon's EC2 and S2 cloud services, and OpenStack's technology is going to be the engine that drives it,' writes blogger Brian Profit. 'Leaving aside the potential problems for user privacy here — and oh, there are many to be addressed to be sure — a plan such as this would represent a stunning coup for AT&T, since they would be able to provide the one thing Apple and Google have not been able to have in their respective plans to own the entire stack: the network on which all communications must flow.'"
I suggest you read the whole article. It tells you about the very dark side of Google.
As if all other companies were honest, and they don't have a very dark side. Troll harder
What I don't see here is inhabitants. There are plenty of examples of vendor lock-in, but these require a valuable service or perhaps "killer app" that lures customers in and keeps them there. AT&T doesn't have that. If I can't use their services to communicate with the world outside (the "walled garden" thing), then what's the lock-in that will keep me using this service? At least Apple and Google have something that could in theory keep people locked in to their respective services.
... Just ask the friendly NSA guy in the datacenter for a copy of your data.
Seriously, would anyone trust their (cloud) data to T after the NSA thing?
To be on the safe side we should all probably always use AGPL and/or GPLv3 for everything. We can always go less restrictive, but motherfuckers will want to pervert the idea of sharing and openness, so just go full RMS from the start and loosen the restraints as you go along, if appropriate.
That's just 2 cents that happened to drop into my drunken brain at this period in history, and they seem like they're making sense.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
When you get to your new provider, you will see that sometimes having "a choice" is really no choice at all. When there's only a couple of players, and they're all trying to buy one another, they realize they've got you over a barrel.
You can try to find the provider that is least objectionable, but you will find that there is no such thing as a telecommunications provider in the United States that is not horrible. You might come to believe one is a little bit less horrible than the other, but when you come down to it, they're all shit. And they can be shit because they got big enough to be able to write the government regulations themselves.
If you want to see corporate behavior start to change, you have to support a constitutional amendment stating that money does not equal speech and corporations are not people. One would think that those two statements are so obvious that no such amendment is necessary, but there's so much money in so few hands right now that they're able to repeatedly fuck the corpse of the Constitution, over and over, until it will say anything they want it to say.
You are welcome on my lawn.