Richard Stallman gets reactionary on clouds
GNU founder Richard Stallman is denouncing clouds as a proprietary trap. I greatly respect this man, but I have problems with his statements on two levels. First, I have previously argued that the most important and game changing factor of cloud computing is not the idea of storing your stuff on the interweb, (which is just SaaS, a concept that is ten years old), but on-demand resource provisioning (this really is a New Thing worthy of our attention).
So my first problem is that people even as informed as RMS are still calling SaaS cloud computing. The second problem I have is with the actual meat of Stallman’s statement: he claims that e.g. giving google your data is somehow going to lock you in, and this will cost you over time. Now despite the fact that he calls this cloud computing, I’m going to grit my teeth and respond anyway: O RLY?
First of all, I recall when Gmail opened up it was free and offered 2 gigs of storage. Today it offers more than 7 gigs of storage, and is still free. Does Google have an immensely evil plan to get me locked into their email system and ten years later to start charging for it? Not likely. And what’s more, the free market won’t stand for it.
Besides, as hardware costs approach zero, businesses built on charging for commodity resources are very low margin and quite frankly not interesting to companies like Google. Instead, it is a way to get you into the Google world. The gateway drug to Google apps, if you will. And all of this is, of course, an evil plan to harvest your attention data and sell you advertising. Well as horrifying as this is — guess what else is an evil way to harvest your data and sell you advertising? Credit cards. We got over it (well, most of us anyway). We have benefitted greatly from it. I hope RMS carries only cash, otherwise he’s giving away his data to proprietary vendors.
Let’s face it, our generation doesn’t expect any privacy. We’ve recognized intuitively that with the great power and capabilities of online search, social networking, and the immense quantities of raw data being generated by everything we do, comes a tradeoff in privacy. Hell, many of us have embraced it. You know there’s this little app called Facebook where people voluntarily dump the most private of data for the world to see. Like credit cards, the utility provided by these things to their users, clearly outweighs their invasion into our privacy.
In his interview, Stallman railed against companies that are claiming that the process of outsourcing your data to external services is inevitable, and said “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity; it’s a marketing hype campaign.” Yes, there’s that. And then there is pure hard factual economics. If Google can store my data cheaper, and more reliably than I can, and on top of that give me some extra capabilities like collaboration, then why shouldn’t I put it there? There is no good economic reason, and if we live in a free market economy, then that means that it is inevitable.
Face it — Skynet is coming, it’s just a question of embracing it early on and developing standards and methods for security and privacy control, or to call it “idiocy” and “stupidity” and do nothing about it. I choose the former.
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