The Kindness of strangers can defeat Proprietary Cloud Computing. Free Software Solutions

Posted by scrubs on Apr 29, 2009 10:10 AM EDT
Free Software Magazine; By Gary Richmond
Mail this story
Print this story

Fashion is fickle. One day thin clients and clusters are the fashion de jour, the next it’s Web 2.0, Virtualisation or distributed computing and Grids. They who live by the sword of fashion will surely perish by it but a new model has been strutting its stuff along the catwalk of web fashion and she goes by the name of Cloud Computing. Like all fashions there is a deal of hype surrounding it but there is a consistent concern emerging from all that hype and is about the dangers of proprietary cloud computing. Richard Stallman has called it a “trap”. He is right—but it is more than that. It is a well-baited, DRM-like honey trap for the unwary. That is not immediately obvious. Like all good traps it suckers you in before the wire noose tightens around your neck. You don’t have any wire cutters in your rucksack but you do have the GPL and free software to effect an escape. Can it save us from vendor lock in and proprietary software?

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Editorial; Groups: Linux

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.