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SaaS: More Bashing of "Cloud Computing"
Just days after Oracle’s Larry Ellison blasted the concept of “Cloud Computing” as being “fashion driven” and “complete gibberish”, cloud computing was bashed again by Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation and an early advocate and promoter of the concept of Open Source software.
In an interview with Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, Stallman said:
“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign. Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”
Stallman said that the ideas around Cloud Computing, SaaS and on-Demand will only lead to more vendor lock-in into proprietary systems that will end up costing them even more than traditional software. Part of the worry is that without direct access to application data, migration to or integration with other systems is much more difficult.”
Stallman said that it’s a mistake to entrust important information with a third party. It is too easy to lose control of that information. Stallman said that “You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”
That’s one view, and one that comes from the far end of the spectrum. But there is some truth that before engaging in SaaS, you should always be clear in understanding how data from the SaaS service could ultimately be exported and migrated somewhere else.
