things

[atheorist]

Okay, so Cosma Shalizi is very smart, and reminded me about linear programming not actually solving the socialist central planning problem. And that reminded me of the New Yorker's View of the World. We each have our ecocentric perspective of the world. And perhaps that is a strategy of how to fight against "the move to 'the cloud'" (a.k.a. the war

Comments

[atheorist]

Here is an analogy. Imagine two elastic containers connected by a tube. The two containers represent the edge and middle of the net. The strategies you mention (locking people out of their computers) are like squeezing one of the containers. What happens if you squeeze one container? The other one gets bigger. There wouldn't be a point to locking customers out of their computers if "the cloud" (big datacenters with walls running lots of Intel chips) didn't exist for the functionality to go to.

You suggest that we could democratize "the cloud" by playing one physical service provider against another - refusing to get locked into using, e.g. the Amazon EC2 API (there's only one entity supplying that API, and so depending on it means Amazon has monopolistic power over you). Abstraction layers are only part of the answer. We would need to assiduously pursue evidence of apparently different entities being actually different, and carefully move the majority of open-source to the less-popular platforms and services.

But the community doesn't appear to pay the slightest attention to supplier engineering - e.g. are you aware of whether Heroku runs on anything other than Amazon? Or whether PyStratus runs on anything other than Amazon? In fact, the community has a horrible record on refusing to get locked into a single supplier - e.g. Intel's x86 chips, which has one competitor, ARM, and they're not direct competitors, they have different niches. UEFI "secure boot" wouldn't be a threat if we weren't already locked into an oligarchy of chip design suppliers.