Good old crazy Richard Stallman states the obvious when he warns that “cloud services” like Gmail are dangerous because “cloud services” like Gmail could be shut down. This bit of obvious piggy-backs on Larry Ellison’s opinion that cloud computing is “fashion-driven.”
Listen: don’t save important stuff in the cloud. Don’t run mission critical apps in the cloud. Don’t trust your uptime to Amazon or Google or Mobeeza or any other upstart. Most of the Web 2.0 service stuff is in beta anyway and any IT company that depends on the cloud is either too poor or too cheap to build out an IT infrastructure.
“One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control,” he said. “It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. 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.”
Right. I just think this guy doesn’t like the word “proprietary.”