Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman

Re:Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman by OpenMIKE on Monday September 29, 2008 @12:35PM (#318490)

I've been thinking about this lately - about giving all of your data to a third party and hoping they don't go out of business or erase your account (for whatever reason).

Issues of software freedom aside, I think the key to making people trust the cloud is to make the data contained in the services more transitive. Essentially, creating a standard Import/Export for the web. i.e. - If I decide to switch to vimeo for my web video needs, I'd like to be able to import all of my videos from youtube without much fuss (or make a local backup). That's not a great example, but it's the general idea.

Hmmm...after I think about it, this pretty much boils down to: "let me get at my data in a format that I can read."

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Re:Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman by iigs on Monday September 29, 2008 @05:05PM (#318828)

I've been thinking about this lately - about giving all of your data to a third party and hoping they don't go out of business or erase your account (for whatever reason).

Or be forced to give up access statistics via Pen Register.

Or provide governments the ability to access your data via CALEA compliance hardware/processes.

I value the privacy of my data as much as I value the integrity of it. I don't see myself doing much cloud computing in the near future.

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Re:Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman by jodrellblank on Monday September 29, 2008 @07:36PM (#319038)

What's wrong with having the company charge you (and all users) enough to make their service profitable, and having a contract between you that they wont erase your data without sending you a copy first?

Keeping your personal data on a free account might be a bit of a crapshoot, but keeping your company data on a paid for service account shouldn't be.

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Re:Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman by OpenMIKE on Tuesday September 30, 2008 @09:05AM (#319530)

Nothing wrong with that at all - that actually sounds really reasonable. Is anybody doing this? I'm getting to the point where I'd pay for most of the stuff that I'm getting for free now - if I had some sort of contract that would give me some recourse in case things go awry.

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Re:Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman by wheels on Monday September 29, 2008 @02:23PM (#318616)

I've thought some about what it would take to set up a system for failed startups so that customers could be assured that their data / services don't disappear when a company goes bust -- something similar to the Free Qt Foundation that KDE has setup with Trolltech:

http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

I think that's a difficult problem for software-as-a-service to overcome.

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Re:Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman by vital_sol on Monday September 29, 2008 @05:01PM (#318819)

Here at salesforce.com (the company that does cloud computing/saas for businesses,) we have the data loader tool that customers can use to download all of their data locally as often as they wish. Also, there is an API so people can write their own backup/restore/integration code.

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Re:Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman by jwilliams on Monday September 29, 2008 @06:37PM (#318966)

Hmmm...after I think about it, this pretty much boils down to: "let me get at my data in a format that I can read."

Basically what you're talking about is standards - but I think the SaaS/Cloud space is too immature to be able to define standards at this stage... In fact, whilst it would give consumers extra security, it would very likely slow down innovation.

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