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Cloud services are actually still very fragile and vulnerable to being replaced. (Granted, it will be annoying and painful to find new ways to do things like s

by sounds 7y ago

Cloud services are actually still very fragile and vulnerable to being replaced. (Granted, it will be annoying and painful to find new ways to do things like search the web, manage files/emails, or stream videos, but I think those can all be solved from the technical side.) About the time the proprietary OS was finally declared dead, new competitors arose with convenient, cheap solutions that made money exactly because "you don't own the hardware the software runs on." So we have another proprietary "open" operating system and it can capitalize on free software but still be proprietary. When it becomes inconvenient (or painful) to use the proprietary solutions, there's a flood of new users to the free software world. I plan to just keep polishing the free software offering. That deprives the proprietary versions of oxygen, because it raises the bar for what is Free.

shadowgovt 7y ago
The significant difference between free vs. proprietary OS and free vs. proprietary cloud are around responsibility and cost. A person can hack away on a free version of an OS for cost of labor and electricity, and making a mistake on one's personal OS build tends to have a "blast radius" limited to the individual user (or perhaps an enterprise relying on whatever software that OS was running). Running a free (as in speech) cloud service? Much trickier as one deals with cost to run the servers on behalf of other people and administrative costs of users of one's cloud offering abusing one's resources. It shifts responsibility and cost models in a way that doesn't map cleanly to pre-cloud models. I'm not sure I disagree with you, but I can't visualize the model of replacement that would actually work (everything I've seen so far has significant gaps in security, reliability, and division-of-responsibility in the design itself).
- sounds 7y ago
  I don't think a Free Software version of what we now call the cloud has to slice the responsibilities the same way. (Reductio ad absurdium) GNU hackers creating an AWS clone? Not gonna happen. I have paid close attention to conversations that Ed Snowden brought up around his attempts to convince Glen Greenwald to use and trust PGP. The Free Software movement will someday have an improvement on PGP. When average ordinary people such as Glen Greenwald can use it, that part is done. Part of what? And... let's argue about what to call it! Free Cloud? Nah, too conformist. GNU's Non-Cloud? The acronym GNC is already taken and besides, it's unpronounceable. Shout out to https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ even though they use the MIT license.
sedachv 7y ago
> Granted, it will be annoying and painful to find new ways to do things like search the web, manage files/emails The best thing I did to reduce annoyance and pain in managing files and emails was to move off of hosted garbage like Gmail and Dropbox to offlineimap/mu4e and Unison/git/rsync.

by sounds 7y ago

shadowgovt 7y ago

The significant difference between free vs. proprietary OS and free vs. proprietary cloud are around responsibility and cost. A person can hack away on a free version of an OS for cost of labor and electricity, and making a mistake on one's personal OS build tends to have a "blast radius" limited to the individual user (or perhaps an enterprise relying on whatever software that OS was running). Running a free (as in speech) cloud service? Much trickier as one deals with cost to run the servers on behalf of other people and administrative costs of users of one's cloud offering abusing one's resources. It shifts responsibility and cost models in a way that doesn't map cleanly to pre-cloud models. I'm not sure I disagree with you, but I can't visualize the model of replacement that would actually work (everything I've seen so far has significant gaps in security, reliability, and division-of-responsibility in the design itself).

sounds 7y ago
I don't think a Free Software version of what we now call the cloud has to slice the responsibilities the same way. (Reductio ad absurdium) GNU hackers creating an AWS clone? Not gonna happen. I have paid close attention to conversations that Ed Snowden brought up around his attempts to convince Glen Greenwald to use and trust PGP. The Free Software movement will someday have an improvement on PGP. When average ordinary people such as Glen Greenwald can use it, that part is done. Part of what? And... let's argue about what to call it! Free Cloud? Nah, too conformist. GNU's Non-Cloud? The acronym GNC is already taken and besides, it's unpronounceable. Shout out to https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ even though they use the MIT license.

sedachv 7y ago

> Granted, it will be annoying and painful to find new ways to do things like search the web, manage files/emails The best thing I did to reduce annoyance and pain in managing files and emails was to move off of hosted garbage like Gmail and Dropbox to offlineimap/mu4e and Unison/git/rsync.