RMS: «... It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign ...»

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and outspoken critic of anything proprietary, recently slammend 'cloud computing'; as 'stupidity' and a 'marketing hype campaign'

"Richard Stallman, Founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, inaugurated the Centre for Excellence in E-governance in Department of Management Studies,Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi on Thursday, December 18, 2008 as part of 6th International Conference on E-governance (December 18-20, 2008)..." --

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.

Google's new cloud computing ChromeOS looks like a plan "to push people into careless computing" by forcing them to store their data in the cloud rather than on machines directly under their control, warns Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the operating system GNU.

Recently, Richard Stallman called cloud computing 'worse than stupidity' His argument for this view is that, by giving your data away to the host of the web application you are using, you are essentially giving up all rights to that data. After all, they own it and there is little you can do to stop them from doing whatever they want with that data.

Cloud computing may a little over-promised, but it isn't "worse than stupidity," as Richard Stallman would say. In fact, it's really a very positive change in the way we use computers. Not only does it eliminate many of the barriers to using any operating system you want, but it also takes the responsibility of storing and backing up data off of the user.

I don’t think it would surprise anyone that I respectfully disagree with this statement. I’m very supportive of his concern about cloud computing, and I agree that it’s something that the Free Software and Free Culture communities need to address. But in rejecting all network computing, I think RMS has thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

"When Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project back in 1983, he launched a movement that would, in time, transform the software industry. The Free Software Foundation, also created by Stallman and now sponsor of the GNU Project, has become a driving force behind the adoption of the widely used GNU GPL software license.

We discussed some of the more recent developments with Richard Stallman, whose passion for freedom in computing remains intense. The following Q & A explores the goals of free software, progress that has been made, and ways to maintain or instill freedom in software that we use..."