Comments on: Is the Cloud Stupid?

By: James Governor’s Monkchips » Three Better Ways To Tell Its not Cloud Computing?

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 10:54:36 +0000

[...] Eric have all helped to advance my thinking on the cloud subject, as have Hugh, Nick, Tim, Tim and Stephen. Its time (if I can find some) for a significant [...]

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:06:00 +0000

Software as a commodity that is ownable implies different rights and constraints than software as a service. I think of the analogy of water. You can dig you own well and have to maintain it, and suffer if the aquifer runs dry (software as ownable). You can have a town well that everyone is entitled to and responsible for (Open Source) and you can have a water utility (cloud) that is incredibly easy to tap into and you pay as you go.

What the current argument is not yet addressing are issues such as: with a majority participation and significant mass reliance on utility, what are the new market models emerge? And what happens if a significant portion of utilities begins to fail? Does regulation occur? Do governments step in?

By: tecosystems » The Forecast? Way More Microsoft

tecosystems » The Forecast? Way More Microsoft — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:48:45 +0000

[...] it to the folks from Amazon to make a liar out of me. Tuesday night around 9:00 PM I wrote the following: In the cloud, F/OSS is at present the rule, rather than the exception…Amazon? [...]

By: Danno

Danno — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:08:49 +0000

Stallman’s argument falls to a basis of trust. He suggests that a Cloud operator will attempt to lock you in in the same fashion that software vendors did, (at least that’s the only interpretation of his argument that makes any sense) but really anyone running on a cloud is doing so with the assumption that they can move their code (and probably their data) with only a bit of trouble. As long as switching cost remains low, the Cloud isn’t a stupid place to be.

Now, there’s another argument he could be making about the Cloud being fundamentally insecure, to which I would counter that relying on any hardware that you have not fabbed yourself is simply asking for some malicious network card vendor to design a backdoor. And surely you can’t trust anyone operating switches between you and whoever you’re communicating with; better start using TCP/IP over carrier pigeon.

But, then again, this is a man who browses the web by having a mail server send him a wget dump of a page.

By: Tim Walker

Tim Walker — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:38:19 +0000

Good post, Stephen. As you rightly emphasize, a key issue that seems to trouble Stallman’s view is that values that are vital to *him* aren’t vital to everyone. Now, I’m sure he *knows* this, but — at least from his comments — it’s not clear that he’s aware that it’s perfectly legitimate (even non-stupid) for people to hold such different views.

I’m grateful for your thinking-through of this in the case of Amazon, since I’m basically non-technical and am familiar with their cloud endeavors only from the perspective of the business pages.

By: Mr Web Service

Mr Web Service — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:16:20 +0000

Frankly, I think Ren Reynolds has hit the nail on the head there.

By: ren reynolds

ren reynolds — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:13:15 +0000

After recently skimming Galloway’s Protocol I feel inclined to note that the Stallman dichotomy of ‘freedom-respecting’ vs propriety is somewhat outmoded and superficial.