[Ilugc] RMS and Cloud Computing
- From: manokaran@xxxxxxxxx (Mano)
- Date: Fri Oct 10 08:53:49 2008
On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Kapil Hari Paranjape <kapil@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Using the cloud to process data is also not such a big problem as long
as data is not "secret" and the result can be easily extracted and a
copy stored with me.
Thats the issue. For all its efficiency and ease of use, if cloud
computing service provider is going to impose a lock-in to use only
its own service, its no different from the lock-in Microsoft is
usually associated with.
If Google docs does not allow data export to odf then its no better
than MS Office (on the freedom aspect.... on features aspect MS Office
still beats it). It doesn't matter whether open source software or
proprietary s/w is used in the backend.
Strangely, many among open source proponents think that as long as
open source s/w is used in the backend and as long as the cloud
computing service provider is contributing to some open source
projects its freedom friendly!!!
In fact, in a discussion in this list long ago it was generally
accepted that freedom is only an issue if s/w is being distributed
without source code. If there was no distribution involved and only
'use' as by a cloud computing service provider, there was no
problem!!!
regds,
mano
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