The FSF is right; a lot of companies implicitly centralize information behind closed doors. It is damaging to liberty in the long term.
What's missing from the statement is a plan. How can users get services equal to or better than those offered by Google/Facebook/Yahoo/... without centralized "cloud" computing? How are the developers going to support themselves financially?
I love and support the efforts of FSF. Almost all of my scientific work rests upon a GNU footing. But before distributed software can eat the centralized software world, it has to be equal or better. This is no different from global warming; if solar power were cheap and effective, nobody would be burning coal.
Even when code is open-sourced, and alternatives are available (gitlab, anyone?) users still flock to centralized services like github. I do, with repos at github. I served my own mail, read it with mutt, and filtered my own spam in the past on my own server. GMail is way better at all three of those things, and I don't have to burn a couple of man-days/year keeping configuration up to snuff.
The unstoppable advantage of free software is that it's a ratchet. Whenever something good emerges, it never goes away. If someone can duplicate GMail's functionality in free software, it will be with us until email goes the way of sanskrit.
The question isn't about how to get a better service. A better service is one which does not enable surveillance. The question is how to get people to stop handing over the keys to the kingdom. Life went on before Facebook, it can go on after Facebook. But as long as people take this attitude that it is essential to have Facebook, network effects will make surveillance very effective.
> A better service is one which does not enable surveillance.
That's one criterion. For many people, ease of use, spam filtering, and so on are others, that may be more important than absolute guarantees about NSA (or other governments') spying.
What's missing from the statement is a plan. How can users get services equal to or better than those offered by Google/Facebook/Yahoo/... without centralized "cloud" computing? How are the developers going to support themselves financially?
I love and support the efforts of FSF. Almost all of my scientific work rests upon a GNU footing. But before distributed software can eat the centralized software world, it has to be equal or better. This is no different from global warming; if solar power were cheap and effective, nobody would be burning coal.
Even when code is open-sourced, and alternatives are available (gitlab, anyone?) users still flock to centralized services like github. I do, with repos at github. I served my own mail, read it with mutt, and filtered my own spam in the past on my own server. GMail is way better at all three of those things, and I don't have to burn a couple of man-days/year keeping configuration up to snuff.
The unstoppable advantage of free software is that it's a ratchet. Whenever something good emerges, it never goes away. If someone can duplicate GMail's functionality in free software, it will be with us until email goes the way of sanskrit.