Stallman's new enemy: the cloud

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org>

| Neil Watson wrote:
| 
| > Stallman does have a point behind the dogma.  There is some risk in
| >  trusting a corporation, which some argue behave like sociopaths,
| > with your data.  Will they keep it private?  Will they discontinue
| > the service and leave you with data in a legacy format?  Will they
| >  disappear and leave you with nothing?
| 
| Your questions are all reasonable, but I can't accept the premise that
| they can never be answered in an acceptable fashion.

How would you answer them?

| There is a difference between complaining the that current
| implementations are imperfect, and asserting that the model itself is
| just hype and can _never_ be useful.


[I use "evil" in this message as shorthand for acting against the 
(potential) customer's interests or the interests of the larger society.  
A monopoly has a higher standard to meet since its users have fewer 
reasonable alternatives.]

Do you know any phone companies that aren't evil?  If so, can you be sure 
they won't turn evil at some point?

Some environments shape organizations to be evil.  For example, it seems 
as if monopolies become evil due to the lack of forces to keep them good.  
(Many think companies become monopolies by being evil; I think that it is 
mostly the other way around.)

Some think that the nature of the construct "corporation" tends to force 
them to become evil.  Think of the documentory "The Corporation".  I don't 
agree, but they do have a point.

I think that the cloud model has a "grain" that makes a perfect (by my 
standards) service hard to imagine.  Perfection includes the time 
dimension: the service has to be stable in its perfection.
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