Richard Stallman "Cloud computing is stupidity"

[nathanosackini]

Last year the Open source Godfather-Richard Stallman made a statement.He said "Cloud computing is worse than stupidity" and i totally disagree bcos its even through cloud apps that we are interacting today. Though he is right in comparing cloud apps with proprietary apps, we have no flexible altenative so cloud is the best thing. When an alternative which is much flexible than this is introduced, we would fall for it But for now i think cloud computing is the best. What do you say?

[HROAdmin26]

You miss his point entirely. Stallman's disagreement with cloud computing is (mostly) not about technical issues - it is about philosophy. His argument is that moving towards the "cloud" is a *backwards* move where you are not only giving up control of the machines running the data, but you are giving up control of your data as well.

I agree with him that this is true. You don't have any control over the apps running in the cloud (security, permissions, code changes) and once your data is in someone else's Datacenter, you don't *know* how many times it's being copied or who is looking at it.

[elija]

It's the first time I have agreed completely with Stallman. Normally I find him to be a bit to extreme*, sincere but extreme. Maybe I am getting to the age that new technology starts to look less good but I don't see me ever giving a faceless corporation control over my data.

I have enough trouble with the amount of data the government holds

* to the point I call him the anti-gates!

[techieMoe]

You miss his point entirely. Stallman's disagreement with cloud computing is (mostly) not about technical issues - it is about philosophy. His argument is that moving towards the "cloud" is a *backwards* move where you are not only giving up control of the machines running the data, but you are giving up control of your data as well.

I agree with him that this is true. You don't have any control over the apps running in the cloud (security, permissions, code changes) and once your data is in someone else's Datacenter, you don't *know* how many times it's being copied or who is looking at it.

I didn't read his post (link please?) but if that's indeed his point I also agree with it. I use Google Gmail and for the most part trust Google to handle my emails ethically, but at the same time I don't store particularly important information on their servers either. The idea of doing *all* my computing on some nebulous server somewhere probably overseas bothers me greatly.

[HROAdmin26]

Linked on Slashdot...

Stallman:

"Software as a service" means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it's even harder for you to patch the program that's running on someone else's server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer. Just like non-free software, "software as a service" is incompatible with your freedom.

This is why he doesn't like "cloud computing."