Re: [RFR] Press release about Debian on public clouds
On 19/03/13 05:27, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 03/19/2013 05:29 AM, Michael Dorrington wrote:
>> On -10/01/37 20:59, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>>> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 02:26:50PM +0100, Francesca Ciceri wrote:
>>>> attached the draft of the upcoming press release about Debian on
>>>> public clouds: it'd be great if you could review it. Particularly,
>>>> I'd need two things:
>>>>
>>>> 1) the correct links for Amazon and Azure images
>>>> 2) a quote from representatives of both Amazon and Azure.
>>> Thanks everyone for the feedback given in this thread. Based on it, I've
>>> prepared a new draft, which I hope could be consensual.
>>>
>>> If you have further comments, please consider joining patches to them, so that
>>> the feedback loop could be quicker (i.e. you wouldn't have to wait 2 days for
>>> me to come up with an alternative proposal that addresses your comments :-)).
>>>
>>> Note that there are also very technical points that anyone on this list could
>>> help with, e.g. the most appropriate image links.
>> I'm not sure if this has been frozen yet, as was originally planned, but
>> I still want to make some comments on Debian and cloud computing.
>>
>> I would very much like the original sentiment of "...we recommend
>> running your own cloud..." be put back into the final press release.
>> And I would hope that to be the Debian official position, that of
>> running a Free Software solution is recommended over a SaaS solution.
>
> Hi,
>
> We aren't discussing SaaS here, only IaaS. So probably you didn't
> really understand what all this was about.
SaaS is being discussed here and I do understand what all this is about.
You can run Free Software on your hardware to get your cloud computing
or you can run non-Free Software on your hardware to get your cloud
computing or you can use Software as a Service to get your cloud
computing. Both using the upcoming Wheezy release to do cloud computing
and using SaaS to do cloud computing are being discussed here.
>> A private Free Software
>> cloud does offer the same freedom but a private non-Free Software cloud,
>> and even worse, a public cloud, does not.
>
> Exactly what freedom do you loose using a public cloud?
The same freedoms you lose by using non-Free Software and more, as, for
instance, you don't even have a copy of the software.
> As
> someone else (Charles?) stated, it's the same as running
> your website on a shared hosting server... You can still leave,
> and setup your service on another platform, or set it up in
> your garage if you wish...
This argument is a bit like "Running non-Free Software that uses a free
format for its data is the same as running Free Software on the same
data." Actually, running on a public cloud is worse than running
non-Free Software as I explained above.
>> For the reasoning behind these comments please see:
>> "Who does that server really serve?"
>> <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html>
>
> This page is about software as a service, which as
> absolutely nothing to do with what we are discussing. In
> other words: I do agree that we shouldn't encourage our
> users to use SaaS, but that's not what this is about.
As I've explained above, you can run a cloud computing solution using
non-Free or Free Software on your own hardware or you can use Software
as a Service to get that cloud computing solution. I hope that people
who believe in Free Software understand this and for cloud computing
solutions will recommend using Free Software and warn against SaaS. To
quote the article by RMS I linked to: "Don't use someone else's server
to do your own computing on data provided by you." This warning is
about exactly what public cloud computing is.
Regards,
Mike.
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