<div dir="ltr">In general I respect Stallman's opinions but this opinion seems out-of-touch.<br><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman">http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman</a><br>
<br>He seems to target large web platforms like that of Google and Yahoo. I see cloud computing as targeting developers and developers as targeting consumers.<br>Stallman may rightly suspect third-party data warehousing but web programmers don't write desktop apps. It seems his view is demonizing any webapp like<br>
Facebook or MySpace but if nobody builds a desktop equivalent, what then is the point of marginalizing them. I don't like webapps much either but their linking, hypertexting and open API's seems fundamental to the idea of the web as a community platform. Amazon sells cloud computing but it's just a scalable platform. The developers build the apps, not Amazon. If Stallman is correct then web developers are wrong and desktop developers are right. He's making a confusing argument.<br>
<br>If a desktop app wants to upset the web paradigm then it would have to provide all the integrated services of the web itself which seems unnecessary. What would he have done? Replace the web itself?<br></div>