Linux Community Magazine

Why and How I Join the Cloud Hype, and So Can You, Free Culture Amigos!
Dec 4, 2010, 23 :02 UTC (1 Talkback[s]) (1510 reads)
(Other stories by HUNG Chao-Kuei)

[ Thanks to Chao-Kuei Hung for this link. ]

"For those of us who have been using GNU/Linux, full-steam cloud computing began with ssh -X or VNC long time ago. For those of us who have contributed to Wikipedia or OpenClipArt or OpenStreetMap, the real benefit of cloud computing lies in the web 2.0 / read-write / prosumer / Pro-Am culture that emphasizes transparency, democracy, freedom of speech, collaboration, etc. Yet recent hypes smelling suspiciously of excessive commercial interest seem to mislead the general public away from the true values of cloud computing and into expensive software products that might lock in users. Lacking an exact and precise source of confusion to debunk the hype, I suggest that fellow advocates of the free culture movement jump on the cloud bandwagon and compete with the hype generator(s?) for the seat behind the steering wheel, popularizing the free culture concepts during the competition, as a peaceful way of fighting the cloud hypes.

"In response to readers' suggestion to look at the cloud hype, I first wrote in May about Microsoft and Taiwan government's collaboration to invest 2.4*10^10 NT dollars smelling badly of corporate greed exploiting public ignorance while feeding on government resources. Seeing that the hype in Taiwan grows stronger and stronger each day, I wrote two blog articles in Chinese ( SaaS and PaaS history) and received some attention. Then I pasted the blog articles into a paper (Chinese) and presented it in one of the many academic cloud conferences. Later Carla Schroder of LinuxToday wrote a piece Keep Your Cloud, I'm a Customer Not a Consumer and I realized that the extensive hype is not limited to Taiwan alone. So I decided that the paper is worth translating into English (with slight modifications), as: "A Brief History of Cloud Computing (Before the Commercial Hype) and Purchasing Suggestions"."

Complete Story

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