Eben Moglen - Freedom in The Cloud

[Louigi Verona]

Very nice insights! Highly recommend to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA

[psishock]

nice speech, but essentially wrong on some approaches.
You see, most of the people nowdays who uses the internet aren't geeky tech people, but totally average normal ones. These people dont want to spend any valuable time to study network architecture and programing knowledge, but gladly accepting services from people who are doing every single work for them, maintaining it, etc. These people have their own, normal lives and using these given services to entertain themselves, or to communicate with other similar people. People demanded these stuffs, we're not forced to use them in any way. They dont care to setup personal programs, applications and check them, maintain them, update them. Most of the times not even care to install 1 single program, but insert the DVD or CD in drive and play the movie, game, or music without any further action.
They are gladly giving up this job to other people, who are "engineers" on the fields, and if they are giving free quality services to them, they will be more than happy. Some random services existed even before facebook or google services for most of the given issues, but clever companies made some exceptionally good ones, that highly appealed to large amount of masses, and they could use it with a few clicks.

Essentially i am using very large variety of programs: closed source, open source, free, payed ones, server/client or p2p based, local or cloud based, you name it. Every model has positive and negative sides, and i am using different models of choice in different situations, considering what could serve me the best and most comfortable at that moments. The beauty of this, that one service does not kill the other one, everybody can choose what are his/her needs.

These stuff will be always demand based, one person will not decide how will the net develop itself. If most of the people will demand easy online quality services, and not want to mess with setting up any OS or programs at all, companies will satisfy their needs. Cloud services will make many daily work dead easy and accessible to many users too.

[Louigi Verona]

No offence meant, but I think you missed the point.

What he suggests is not for every person out there to write his own server - this is nuts. He suggests to produce small devices which would be ready servers which you would use as a user. You do not have to be a geek.

And in fact, there is such a project going on already, called Diaspora. And there is already software which does more or less what he says, it just hasn't been put together into a working, user-friendly system yet.

People demanded these stuffs, we're not forced to use them in any way.

That argument I believe we've had before. I largely disagree on this, although this is not the topic of Eben's speech directly.

Essentially i am using very large variety of programs: closed source, open source, free, payed ones, server/client or p2p based, local or cloud based, you name it. Every model has positive and negative sides, and i am using different models of choice in different situations, considering what could serve me the best and most comfortable at that moments. The beauty of this, that one service does not kill the other one, everybody can choose what are his/her needs.

I understand this position, but I personally do not share it. To me comfort of use is no the main deciding factor. Yet I am not a geek. So this really has nothing to do with being technically adept.