Richard Stallman: Cloud Computing a Trap

machine

Oct 01, 2008
       
       
       
       
       
       
As an original founder of Open Source, Richard Stallman cautions in an
interview with the British Guardian newspaper about the repercussions
of cloud computing. His main objection: dependency and loss of control.
       
       
       
       
Just days after Stallman finished
celebrating
the 25th anniversary of his GNU Open Source project, the controversial
free software activist was again making headlines. This time his
diatribe was aimed at a current trend in the IT industry known as cloud
computing. Through this service, which even
Red Hat offers
with its Jboss over the Amazon EC2, IT power such software, computing
capacity, and even storage can be rented from external sources rather
than being drawn from the desktop. The promise to users is the greater
flexibility of paying only for what they need. Stallman doesn't trust
this promise. He takes Google's Gmail service as an example and warns
that such web-based programs force locked and proprietary systems on
users, and can only become increasingly expensive.
Stallman's
Guardian interview
contains harsh words: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's
a marketing hype campaign." He suspects a strategic conspiracy:
"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody
saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to
make it true."
The Open Source activist warns computer users to
maintain control over their information instead of giving it away to
outsiders: "One reason you should not use web applications to do your
computing is that you lose control." To do so, he says, would be almost
as bad as using a proprietary program. Stallman thereby sticks close to
the mission of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its recent
Statement on Freedom and Network Services
.
Through this statement, FSF and activist group autonomo.us came
together to discuss issues of freedom for users under the concept
Software as a Service (SaaS). The similarity in concept with that of
Stallman's is no accident. Stallman was also the first president of FSF
while he was helping develop the General Public License (GPL).
               
               
               

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