David Crossland

David Crossland's Blog The Guardian recently posted an article quoting Richard Stallman on cloud computing. If a user wants to use network applications in freedom, they can do their own computing on their own computer with their copy of a freedom-respecting network-accessed program if their computer is a network server. Is this a good idea? Yes, I think so. While this is not the common vision of “cloud computing,” I think that is what critics of “cloud computing” like autonomo.us should be enabling people to do. Amazon offers a popular “elastic cloud computing” virtual server hosting service, where users upload a GNU/Xen-Linux system disk image which is booted but for which bandwidth, storage disk and processing power is ‘elastic’ - can scale arbitrarily, and on demand. I have not used this service, but I hear it is very simple to use with a pre-configured disk imag... (more)