The Economist has published an editorial on May 28, declaring victory of the open source paradigm in the software world, but predicting complications that ‘threaten openness’, in the new reality of cloud computing.
Thomas Lord offers the following commentary/critique in the Autonomo.us mailing list:
“The article asserts that “it is now generally accepted that the future will involve a blend of both proprietary and open-source software”. There is a banal sense in which that’s true: nobody expects proprietary software to stop being sold anytime soon. In its context, though, the Economist appears to assert that there is consensus this situation is a good thing.
In other words, the Economist is unconcerned with and apparently unaware of or snubbing the free software movement.
There orientation in that regard appears and effects their view of the cloud. They identify “the problem” this way:
“But customers risk losing control once again, in particular over their data, as they migrate into the cloud. Moving from one service provider to another could be even more difficult than switching between software packages in the old days. For a foretaste of this problem, try moving your MySpace profile to Facebook without manually retyping everything.”
In other words, they are Just Fine with centralized, proprietary surveillance-oriented services just so long as those services agree to compete over portable data.
The Economist cares not a whit for user’s software freedoms on the server.
Perhaps it would be worth-while to write openly to them reminding them of the difference between the open source marketing campaign and the free software movement and, from there, pointing out how user’s are still harmed by these kinds of proprietary services even if there is competition among them.
Certainly, data portability is a goal that can be shared between open source cartels, the free software movement, and users. Indeed, issues of data portability are nothing new in the history of computing.
But data portability alone is not enough to protect users.”
June 4th, 2009 at 10:06 pm