But the cloud does provide value to me. I can spend a few bucks and a few minutes to set up Google Apps for email on my domain. It takes hours of futzing to configure a home email server. My time is valuable, so the cloud service is worth it.
I'd love to have a comparable platform that I could run from my closet, but that's still in the distance. For now, cloud services are usually the best way to minimize cost.
Re:Is it futile to un-Google?
by copsarebastards on Monday September 14, 2015 @02:21PM
(#10216536)
> I can spend a few bucks and a few minutes to set up Google Apps for email on my domain.
This is a perfect example of what I'm saying: this has nothing to do with the cloud, and everything to do with the tooling Google Apps provides. There's nothing preventing the open source community from implementing equivalent tooling which targets federated servers.
Could you point out what in any of these services actually depends on the cloud?
Email runs perfectly fine on single servers (Gmail). Network file storage is a solved problem (Dropbox/Google Drive/YouTube/various photo buckets). What these things are missing are dynamic web 2.0 GUIs, not backends. And the GUI doesn't have anything to do with the cloud.
The cloud is a huge innovation, but it isn't an innovation that provides anything for us, it's an innovation for centralized businesses. The cloud has absolutely no value until you're trying to serve millions of users on one service. Federated systems like email are perfectly capable of handling everything that the cloud does for you and I.
We don't need the cloud.