Criticism of the rising cloud computing meme has come from a seemingly unlikely place: GNU creator and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman. Traditionally, any option to Microsoft’s dominance would be a welcomed change in the open source community, but Stallman foresees corporate bullies being replaced with different corporate bullies who would put your privacy at risk.
Cloud computing, which is being championed by major companies like Google and Amazon, and more recently and reluctantly, Microsoft, has been touted as the next step following Web 2.0 success. It involves consumers storing their data “in the cloud,” a network of computers operated by a third party.
The idea is that storing data this way will increase the speed of computing—much in the same way that makes Google’s search engine super quick—and will ultimately send the costs of machines down that access the internet by not requiring much hardware. Gmail is predicated on the idea with storage capacity increasing continuously.
Eventually, so the theory goes, consumers would only need lightweight machines for accessing the Net when all data and needed programs are stored online. At the same time, access becomes more widespread.
And that should be a good thing, right? Stallman says, in many more words, no.
“”It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” Stallman told The Guardian. “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.”
Stallman, not caring at all to tell how he really feels about it, went on to compare the cloud computing meme to women’s fashion, calling it “idiocy,” “gibberish,” and “insane.”
His chief complaint: Cloud computing means somebody else has control of your stuff. If the company disappears, so does your stuff. If the government demands your data, they get it. A glitch in the system shutting down access. . . you get the point.
“If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”
Stallman’s right in a lot of ways. Sarah Palin recently learned a web-based email account isn’t the most secure thing in the world. If you plan on storing sensitive or personal data, it’s probably best to keep it on a machine that’s yours and yours alone.
