Each time I see the FSFE picture, just like on Daniel’s last post to planet.d.o, where it says:
“There is NO CLOUD, just other people’s computers”
it makes me so frustrated. There’s such a thing as private cloud, setup on your own set of servers. I’ve been working on delivering OpenStack to Debian for the last 6 years and a half, motivated exactly to fix this issue: I refuse that the only cloud people could use would be a closed source solution like GCE, AWS or Azure. The FSFE (and the FSF) completely dismissing this work is more than annoying: it is counter productive. Not only the FSFE shouldn’t pull anyone away from the cloud, but it should push for the public to choose cloud providers using free software like OpenStack.
The openstack.org market place lists 23 public cloud providers using OpenStack, so there is now no excuse to use any other type of cloud: for sure, there’s one where you need it. If you use a free software solution like OpenStack, then the question if you’re running on your own hardware, on some rented hardware (on which you deployed OpenStack yourself), or on someone else’s OpenStack deployment is just a practical one, on which you can always back-up quickly. That’s one of the very reason why one should deploy on the cloud: so that it’s possible to redeploy quickly on another cloud provider, or even on your own private cloud. This gives you more freedom than you ever had, because it makes you not dependent anymore on the hosting company you’ve selected: switching provider is just the mater of launching a script. The reality is that neither the FSFE or RMS understand all of this. Please don’t dive into the FSFE very wrong message.