"Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.
But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.
'It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign,' he told The Guardian.
'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.'"
I read this a while ago, and it has kept coming back to my mind as I have been reading about other things like the Google deal with the publishers, and realizing that freedom of information is not really on their minds at all. I think Stallman is right, and having spent an afternoon this holiday installing Ubuntu on an old computer, I feel it is important not to give into the cloud hype.
