On Tuesday 02 Feb 2010, Peter Merchant wrote: > I'm Interested in your take. Is he spouting nonsense again? > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.st > allman
RMS has been accused of spouting nonsense ever since the first draft of the GPL. I will acknowledge that he 'has a way with him' that tends to generate hostility towards his point of view. However, he has been proved right more often than he has been proved wrong, so I always think hard when he makes a pronouncement. Personally, I've been somewhat concerned about cloud computing ever since the idea was first mooted. On the one hand you've got convenient and flexible storage. On the other: 1. You've got to use software running on someone else's computer over which you have no control whether it's open source or not. 2. There is the potential to lose your data, either legally (all your bases are belong to us) or in reality, as with the recent loss of data by Sidekick (http://www.intomobile.com/2009/10/12/t-mobile-sidekick-user-data-lost-in- microsoft-server-crash.html). Admittedly the data loss case was by a company owned by Microsoft (Need I say more?). The cause was reported by some sources to be because MS were monkeying around with the server code (ie trying to replace it with their own buggy crap) and by others that they simply had no backup (the mind boggles). Who can swear that Google or Amazon might not have a similar catastrophe as the years go by? -- Terry Coles 64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Wed 2010-02-03 20:00 http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2645413 Chat: http://www.mibbit.com/?server=irc.blitzed.org&channel=%23dorset List info: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dorset
