Stallman and Cloud Computing

I set aside some time today to prepare for a class on the free and open source software (FOSS) movement. As luck would have it, the first email message I opened included a quote from Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the GNU Project.

The quote was taken from an article in the September 29, 2008 issue of The Guardian. In that piece, Stallman stated that cloud computing (one definition is that your “stuff” is out there on the Internet rather than being on your computer or an office server – Gmail is one example) is a trap. He continued by arguing, “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity. It’s a marking hype campaign.” According to The Guardian he is not alone in these thoughts – Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, expressed a similar sentiment a week prior to Stallman's comments. Stallman continues his argument against cloud computing by stating that “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.”