Richard Stallman and Cloud Computing Why we should avoid the could…

Richard Stallman and Cloud Computing

Why we should avoid the could…

Who is Richard Stallman? Founder of the free software movement - 1983

- Software should be free Founder of the GNU Project - 1983

- He basically wrote most of the code for the Linux operating system

Part founder of the open source movement - 1998- Open source should be available for software for independent developers and further development

Open source Guru- He wrote most of the GNU operating system

Huge privacy advocate

What is Cloud Computing?

Internet based applications- Email- Word processors- Photo editing- anything else non processor / gpu intensive

Internet based services- internet storage- Email hosting and mid transfer storage- private business networking- web development

Who’s Behind It? Google - Google Docs - GMail Microsoft - to be announced at

PDC2008 Amazon - Elastic Compute Cloud

AKA EC2 AT&T - AT&T Synaptic Hosting CISCO - WebEx and PostPath

Cloud Computing

Computer Run Programs

Google’s Predicted Cloud Computing Vs. Computer Based Programs

Note: All these companies already have internet based systems in place or are in the process of developing them

How are They Related?

Stallman was interviewed by The Guardian and had this to say about cloud computing:

- “It's stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign”

- “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”

Related Continued

- “One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control”

- “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 defenseless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software”

Note: One of the biggest issues that Stallman has with cloud computing isn’t necessarily the concept of server farms and online storage but users not having access to the code of the programs which they use through remote servers. This give them “a loss of control”.

What You Must Realize

Stallman has a lot of influence in the computer technology world because of who he is

Stallman tends to be extreme in his opinions

Stallman is privacy crazy When Stallman wants to make a

point he tends to rant He comes off as a little crazy

sometimes

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Richard Stallman from “What is Free Software?”

Some Real Facts About the Cloud This technology is still in its infancy though it technically began

in the 1990’s with the ATM networks The only servers that are currently truly capable of handling

such a large user load are those owned by very large corporations- i.e. Google, Microsot, and Amazon- This will create a market that’s very hard for new companies to access based off of starting costs

Theorists suggest that cloud computing will see a drastic price jump for users once it truly takes off

Although cloud computing can be a very reliable technology, a business that relies on a cloud based infrastructure vs an in house infrastructure may experience issues with getting good / person IT support

Example #1

Amazon Web Server Downtime Amazons EC2 system was downed by

intermittent connectivity failures for 18 hours Downtime directly affected businesses relying

on their services This has shown that “the cloud” has many

potential points of failure

- One of them being hardware reliability

Example #2

Steamload Meltdown The company formerly known as Steamload collapsed

- Steamload was a prestigious online storage service This left many paying customers without access to their

online data including pictures, music, movies, and more- these customers were both recreational and corporate

The data was in tack (supposedly) but the users had no access to it

Many of the previous customers never received their lost data

This shows that even if the service is reliable the integrity of a company in the cloud may not be

Example #3

Davidairey.com Website was HiJacked via Gmail hack The domain name was being held ransom by an internet

“pirate” AKA an internet “cracker” Gmail hacked through filter auto installed upon visiting

website “to use Google’s free GMail service for anything business-

related is naïve” This website tells you step-by-step how to HiJack a Gmail

account the same way davidairey.com was HiJacked This shows that to rely on an online service such as Gmail

appose to an internal service / desktop based program can make you more vulnerable to security threats and “crackers”

Example #4

I’m in Your Google Docs, Reading Your Spreadsheets A feature in Google Analytics allows any person with

access to that account to give valuable information regaurding businesses inner workings to any outsider

This happened by accident to David Gallagher- Logged into his account one day and found many official documents for 130 websites- Most belonged to HeartLand Newspapers

There was no one he could truly contact to report the error With this information he could have easily harmed the

company and even have controlled certain aspects of their web sites and web traffic

In Conclusion

Cloud computing isn’t necessarily a bad thing It shouldn’t be used for business purposes Stallman has a habit of being very accurate

with his predictions regarding the computer industry and new technologies

- If theorists are accurate, then the public may see a decline in cloud computing upon the raising of service prices

Discussion Question

With the experiences so far in the cloud computing market, does this seem like a technology that’s going to truly take off or a temporary term that will fade with time?

Given that the majority of the users of cloud applications are NOT programmers, is it really a good idea, as Stallman stated, to make the source code available AND controllable for these programs?

Works Cited http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/30/2146250 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman http://osdir.com/ml/culture.publications.bytesforall.readers/2002-10/msg00009.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10054253-92.html http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/google-gmail-e-mail-hijack-technique/ http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley/2008/05/13/amazon_cto_on_cloud_computing.html http://wiki.cloudcommunity.org/wiki/CloudComputing:Incidents_Database