The truth is out there [in the cloud]
Monday 13 October 2008 - Filed under Tech Notes
There was an interesting post about cloud computing on one of the blogs I follow, and it lead me to the source article by The Guardian, which portrayed strongly opinionated statements by Richard Stallman, the guru of free software:
The concept of using web-based programs like Google’s Gmail is “worse than stupidity”, according to a leading advocate of free software.
Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.
But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.
“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.
“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”
The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.
(Dot dot dot)
Stallman, who is a staunch privacy advocate, advised users to stay local and stick with their own computers.
“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.”
An absolute majority of the world’s coolest software that are worth paying for – in my opinion – are actually free. And an absolute majority of those free software are distributed and licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL) or a variant of it. The fact that Richard Stallman originally wrote the GNU GPL, the most widely used copyleft licence, alone makes him one of the most respected, influential figures in the world of software development. That’s why his views are taken seriously.
Keep track of your tenants… in the cloud
While Gmail is one of the most frequently cited examples of cloud computing, people of 2008 are doing much more in the cloud than simply storing their email messages. I, too, use Gmail extensively when it presents itself as the most convenient messaging option in my immediate computing environment. But cloud computing goes far beyond that and far beyond archiving documents and spreadsheets in some unknown location in the cloud for the anytime-anywhere convenience. Companies are shifting their customer management and project management platforms over to the cloud. Some landlords choose to manage rental properties and tenants in the cloud. What about doing complete corporate accounting in the cloud for a small monthly fee ranging from $25 to $50 per organisation as opposed to paying much larger sums of money to license, install, learn, use, and maintain a traditional accounting software package? That’s (just some of) cloud computing for you, and that is the reality of 2008 and beyond.
A rosy cloud
Eventually, “the world’s easiest ________ system” will be the one up in the cloud. For software architects, this means that there is now a gold rush to identify the fields of business that can and should be cloud-enabled. The cloud is where all the clunky, user-unfriendly software products (or ideas) are rejuvenated into sexy, lightweight, maintenance-free “services”. Besides, “cloud” sounds much funkier, more business-oriented, and higher up than the plain “Web” or “Internet”. Service providers and consumers are excited about how the cloud could potentially bring time- and cost-saving changes to the way people do business and everyday tasks. Because of rosy commercial implications across a variety of industry sectors, and for reasons to do with my own profession, I have to play the advocate of cloud computing, which makes me – according to Mr Stallman’s words – precisely that “somebody saying this is inevitable,” which in turn places me inside “businesses campaigning to make it true.”
Give us the disk and we’ll give your life back… um, that’s so 90′s
At the same time, I am obliged to elaborate on Mr Stallman’s concerns – namely, why cloud computing is a trap and why it is worse than stupidity. First of all, whatever job you get done in the cloud, your information asset – be it an email communication, a photograph, accounts receivable, a response to a tender, or the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis – is locked away in an unknown location or locations somewhere on the planet. In other words, while you may be able to access your information asset whenever and wherever you want, you are never in physical possession of the “live” copy of it. You can’t control or be sure who else can search and access your information asset. Worse, you don’t know how many copies of your information asset are really floating around in the cloud, whom to ask, or whether deleting it will indeed get rid of ALL of its “backup” copies. You may recall a movie or two that revolve around the line: “Give us the disk and we’ll give your life back.” Well, cloud computing renders such a plot less than realistic because there is no disk to carry around in the first place and the information already exists everywhere. It’s no surprise that Richard Stallman is furious about the privacy implications of software operating in the cloud.
To them, Sona is a one-way street; what goes in never comes out
Not that I hold anything against it personally, but Gmail is indeed a prominent example that demonstrates the perils of cloud computing. As a user of Gmail, I once asked myself: How do I make a backup of all my Gmail messages to store them in my own computer – without having to laboriously forward every single message to a non-Gmail email address, that is? The short answer: I don’t. The long answer: I can’t because Google dictates that there is no reason to make an “offline” backup, ever. Indeed, why bother archiving email messages manually when Google does it for me and even makes them highly searchable as long as they remain in the cloud? It’s not like it costs me anything to keep those messages in the cloud and I certainly won’t be running out of storage space at least for the next however many years. Don’t worry about housekeeping; instead, focus on the real work and get productive – that is the central idea pushed by cloud computing. The only catch is one that Google doesn’t want me to stay conscious of: What I do on Google stays with Google.
Cloud computing: worse than proprietary software?
Actually, in the case of Gmail (and some other Web-based email services), it is possible to keep offline copies of messages by setting up the Web-based email account on a desktop mail client program such as Outlook and Thunderbird instead of using a Web browser. This practice, however, very much defeats the purpose of cloud computing and the owner of the Gmail account still can’t do much about any of the past messages that have already been archived in the cloud. It should be noted that this limitation remains a business decision rather than a technical issue. Google could have kindly provided a functionality where the Gmail user could freely export their email messages into a standard offline file format straight from the browser; but they didn’t because that would have gone against the reason why Google products and services exist in the first place. Whether Google will make this a paid feature in the future when the Gmail service finally comes out of its years-old beta status, is entirely up to Google, though I think it’s unlikely.
Pay for it one way or another
Some people who were really eager to be able to archive their Gmail messages offline against Google’s will stumbled upon a commercial third-party software product that let them do exactly that. It was, however, later discovered that the product did more than just that; it was covertly sending the user’s Gmail password to the developer of the software without the user’s knowledge. The developer quickly announced that it was an honest mistake, but the damage had been done. Such is the price people get to pay – or the risk they run into – when relying on services that run in the cloud, free or otherwise, to do the jobs that are critical to the business or the individual.
Information credit crunch
Privacy and ownership concerns are not unique to cloud computing; they apply to traditional non-cloud software products, too. But things are certainly much more vulnerable up in the cloud because of the inherent lack of control and the magnified risk of unwanted exposure of information assets. At the end of the day, it comes down to the developer’s philosophy, ethics, and commitment as well as the consumer’s awareness. Maybe the world needs an international legal framework that specifically addresses transparency and unethical practices in the cloud and ensures that wrongdoers are prosecuted. If cloud computing kept on proliferating without sufficient awareness and regulatory measures, the next global credit crunch could come from not financial assets but information assets. If it came to that, will the government “guarantee” that the billions of Google / Yahoo / Windows Live account holders are able to verifiably and irrevocably withdraw their information assets and deposit them elsewhere?
2008-10-13 » JK