With every shift from a piece of free software to a web-based network service, we have moved from a situation where a user had control over his or her software — users’ of “traditional” free software have access to source and have control over the system on which the computer runs — to a situation where users have very little control over their software at all.
From Benjamin Mako Hill at Autonomo.us, the free network services advocacy blog:
“With the rise of network services, the idea of an operating system that is largely reduced to a web browser is no longer difficult to imagine. Even if one were to limit themselves entirely to Google services, one would have a word processor, spreadsheet, email client, photo management software, chat client, RSS reader, and much more — most of the applications that most people use. As Mobily points out, this means that the details of any operating system begin to matter less. It doesn’t matter if your OS doesn’t have many native programs; if the programs you want run over the web, all you need is a browser.
Mobily argues that Chrome OS will be a win for GNU/Linux on the desktop because Google’s might and market power will help free software succeed where it has struggled in the past. And he might be right. But even if Mobily is completely right and Chrome OS becomes a raging success, it is not at all clear that this will represent a victory of any meaningful sort for software freedom and for users’ autonomy.
Chrome OS is, as it is described, an explicit attempt to build a system that changes where ones computing happens. In doing so, Google is trying to create an OS built around “Software as a Service” that replaces applications a user might run on their own computer with applications that runs on servers outside user control. A Chrome OS user’s computer doesn’t need to be powerful — Google claims that Chrome OS will be ideally suited to low power netbooks — because the user’s computation is happening on Google’s servers instead of the netbook itself.
If switching to Chrome OS means giving up Thunderbird to use GMail, or giving up Openoffice.org to use Google Docs, or giving up Pidgin to use a web-based Google Talk, or giving up Evolution to use Google Calendar, we have reduced the influence and success of the free software desktop, not sealed its victory as Mobily suggests. In a SaaS world, there will be less free software being used and, much more importantly, users will be less free.
With every shift from a piece of free software to a web-based network service, we have moved from a situation where a user had control over his or her software — users’ of “traditional” free software have access to source and have control over the system on which the computer runs — to a situation where users have very little control over their software at all. Google offers no source for the applications that run their web services and, even if they did, they do not offer users the ability to change the software that runs on Google servers.
Chrome OS, or any OS designed around pushing users computation off their computers and onto servers outside of their control is regressive for software freedom. If Chrome OS is, as Mobily suggests, the key to free software’s victory on the desktop, it would be be a ironic and bitter victory indeed.”
That´s an extremely interesting topic.
The rise in the storage/computing capacity of individual users made possible the appearance and rise of user-based-p2p. I would argue that this is consumer´s/user´s capital. Now, and parallel to a crowdsourcing process we are witnessing how this capacity (user´s capital) could fall into a descendant spiral. As a result users would lose two times: the control over capacity and the benefits that the new possibilities offer.
If “web based network-services” evolve from a corporative driven perspective instead of a user driven approach, users will lose the control over the means of distribution, production and consumption, and these means would again be corporatively monopolized.
Which turn will that process take will probably depend on who is able to provide those services more efficiently (that’s what the economists say).
Here there is an old article on Wired about how companies are targeting cloud-computing resources
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-05/mf_amazon?currentPage=1
I think we, as users, have (still) the capacity to compete in order to avoid corporate monopoly. I would even defend that we have an obligation in this sense.
Ignacio
Chrome OS is sort of a very basic operating system based on Linux. i wish that google make an operating system just like Windows XP that would compete with Microsoft