So says Richard Stallman the father of the Free Software Foundation. He makes a simple argument: By using Cloud Computing applications you surrender your life (data) to some big company you can’t trust. You’re no longer in control. Conversely, if you keep everything on your (Linux) desktop, you’re the master of your own destiny.
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This is, to say the least, countercultural. The new and improved wisdom is “everything”, every application, every service will be delivered from the Cloud, a “server farm” somewhere in the world. To be a little more precise, yesterday’s difference between the e-mail client application and the e-mail service is going away. The browser becomes your OS (Operating System) through which the e-mail service (Gmail or Outlook Web Access) is delivered. Even Photoshop will go this way: you store the original image in the Cloud and, through your browser, you navigate the universe of editing features. You give an order, say crop a part of the picture, Gaussian blur, twist a color. Then, the order is executed on the server, in the Cloud. This uses much faster computers than your laptop and your browser gets the rendered result.
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This is exactly what Photoshop Express does. The old way local processed the image locally because you couldn’t count on the network bandwidth (speed) to ship back an updated image from the server each time you made a modification. The local processor had fast access to local memory, performed the image rotation and the screen had similar fast access to the modified image residing in memory. The ‘everything local’ (storage, processor, display) advantage hasn’t disappeared, but networks are faster, servers have more muscle (in most cases) than my laptop and we use smarter ways to pick which part of the image we want to send from the server to the browser. Put another way, Photoshop in the Cloud isn’t a universal solution: graphics professionals will want a 30”screen, eight processors and 16 gigabytes of local storage. But ‘the rest of us’ will find the Cloud solution satisfactory, especially if we can walk to any computer in the world, upload, edit and e-mail polished pictures without a local application, using Photoshop (or its competitors) as a service, not a desktop application.
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This is both an actual example and a valid metaphor for the new genre of application software delivered as a service (SaaS) from enterprise servers or from a Cloud Computing provider such as Google or Microsoft Live. Stallman will have none of this. Interviewed by The Guardian, he counters: “It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenseless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”
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The gentleman is opinionated, to say the least. A Google search on his name will produce a rich trove of strongly worded rants revolving around one idea: software ought to be free. This hasn’t made him friends in companies such as Microsoft but Linux and its cousin FreeBSD, all related to AT&T’s Unix, have become indispensable components of modern computing. Richard Stallman knows very well that, without the free software movement, there would be no Cloud Computing. Amazon, Yahoo!, Google and most others run on free Unix relatives.
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Going back to the argument Stallman just made against Cloud Computing, it’s hard not to find parts of his statement either naïve or disingenuous. If you use proprietary software, he says, “You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.” The idea is that free, Open Source software, protects people against dirty deeds, manipulations from the authors of proprietary software. Sounds ominous but, regrettably, Stallman forgets to offer examples of such bad actions. Higher price, perhaps? But the cost of ownership, that is training, maintenance and the like, dwarfs the initial price tag of software, be it on the desktop or on servers. Unlike an extraordinarily gifted programmer such as Stallman, most users cannot inspect the source code of their word processor or e-mail program. As a result, the ‘protection’ afforded by ‘freedom-respecting’ programs isn’t as good for me as it is for him.
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There is more. We no longer live in a disconnected computing world: we get e-mail, we look up Richard Stallman on Wikipedia. So, even if we sagely run spreadsheets or photo-editing programs on our desktops (the Cloud Computing giant Google offers a neat desktop Picasa 3 on Linux…), we have to communicate and we have no way to inspect the software that runs on the network. Like it or not, we have no choice, we trust others with our data. Bad things happen from time to time, but not to the point of killing the system. Cloud Computing may or may not be The Future but doing everything on the desktop is definitely passé.
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Richard Stallman forgets a statistical truth: Trusting people get screwed sometimes. Paranoid people get screwed all the time. –JLG
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8 Comments
Mr Stallman probably went a bit too far on this point, but I think I can give an idea about how I think he thought about it:
For RMS, software is either free (good) or proprietary (evil), (and I can agree with that to an extent ..) BUT: What category does cloud computing software fit it?
1 – Freedom of use is not granted (terms of use)
2 – Freedom to study the source (or I’d rather say to do security audit on it) is unavailable.
3 – Freedom to share the software with others is unavailable unless your friends buy/rent the service too.
This actually shows how bad can cloud computing be as far as freedom (and thus RMS) is concerned, and that is why I think RMS is that much against it.
Mr. Stallman did not go to far.
And there is a difference between being opinionated and being a visionary.
His counter cultural ideas have produced things like all of the Linux OS’s, creative commons, shareware, firefox, open media formats, etc.
It is amazing to me that people still do not get that it is free as in speech not free as in beer. More accurate investigative reporting would show that Richard Stallman does not believe all software should be free, but OPEN.
Common knowledge produces exponetial innovation and the market begins to be driven by innovation rather that manipulation and control.
The current cloud computing trend is engineered and promoted by large profit based organizations. It is not opinion to say that you will be at the mercy of what ever company provides you with a cloud service. If you are not installing a program, but rather choosing a service, you are now just a consumer. It is plain fact. I am amazed at how readily we jump on popularity band-wagons at the expense of basic logic.
I wrote this in response to a Google Chrome OS article. Just replace the word Google with your favorite company. I am posting this writing to every site I can find concerning cloud computing.
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This is a technological trap to the nth degree. I see a endless myriad of problems with cloud computing that benefit nothing to anybody except hosts, hackers, terrorist, and the government. If you like the idea of cloud computing, then you like the idea of all your personal work and data in the hands of every google tech and even the company receptionist. Ones argument for cloud computing must be.. why worry about losing my work and identity, when I can just give it away. That copyright or patent request ain’t gonna do ya much good after some enterprising google employee notices your million dollar idea and decides he’d rather not work for a living anymore cause it is now his million dollar idea and he has the patent to prove it. My data is on my system. For you to get it means you have to get past my firewall, install your malware, get past my encryptions, and hope I don’t catch your program reporting back to you. Even then you only have access to what your malware is programmed to access. For you to get *ALL* my data in a cloud, all you have to do is hack my password. Duhhh. Also, if you like the idea of cloud computing, then you also like idea of working slower and slower. IP’s are complaining that a small percentage of file sharers are hogging the majority of their bandwidth. Whats gonna happen when EVERYBODY becomes a ‘file sharer’ with every file they have? You also realize the video streamers are just getting started dontcha? And as it’s been pointed out, what’s going to happen when there’s a outage? Your new high tech ‘dumb terminal’ is going to need a host ya know. And screw hacking your little pc. Hackers are gonna hack EVERYBODY in one shot! And what about that disgruntled google employee? Terrorists are now drooling at the prospect that we are consolidating all our resources into one handy target. In this age of identity theft, I CANNOT believe that somebody would trust ANY their info to be in one place (accept their home). Even a TRUSTED place (cause there is no such thing). Its unfathomable! What OS and processors do you think goggles runnin right now? Would that be the easily hackable combination of Windows on Intel? Just one hacker access into a major hosts password file and cloud computing will be gone forever. Along with that company. It WILL happen. Cloud computing will prove itself to be a ‘company ender’ and these companies are racing to beat each other to that end. Which they FULLY DESERVE for trying to pull such a stunt. Cloud computing has got to be the most irresponsable concepts ever put forth by ANY industry. It is a gigantic backwards step in the evolution of information security at a time when information security is almost non-existent. It is a inherently flawed concept that benefits NOBODY but hackers, terrorist, the government, and hosting companies (till they get hacked that is). Cloud computing will only be used by two groups of people.. people who believe tabloids, and full blown certifiable idiots.
How intersting to finally find a place were Cloud Computing is being criticised not by it’s technical flaws, but by the cultural tendency is promoting. Things like how the low computing requirements of people make the Cloud possible, how we expose ourselves to advertisment in order to get “free” storage and how we are fooled when standardized scrapsare delivered to individual users, complement the views of Stallman, and are exposed on a recent independent editorial. Check it out! http://www.riorevuelto.org/site/index.php?text=view&tipo=&bot=&id_articulo=5418&idioma=en
Greets!
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[...] “Cloud Computing is bad for you”… So says Richard Stallman the father of the Free Software Foundation. He makes a simple argument: By using Cloud Computing applications you surrender your life (data) to some big company you can’t trust. You’re no longer in control. Conversely, if you keep everything on your (Linux) desktop, you’re the master of your own destiny. . [...]… [...]