"...The current generation of network services or Software as a Service can provide advantages over traditional, locally installed software in ease of deployment, collaboration, and data aggregation. Many users have begun to rely on such services in preference to software provisioned by themselves or their organizations.

"Cloud Computing risks undoing the gains of the free software movement in ‘owning and controlling our own code‘. Thomas Lord examines the potential for achieving software and user freedom in the world of ‘cloud computing’ (a concept he rejects, preferring ‘utility computing’, see below).

Eben Moglen gave a talk last week on ``Freedom In the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing''. If you are interested in the problem of network services, you need to watch this!

"...I'm going to talk about the AGPL 3.0, why it's important that we put effort into figuring out what freedom for different technologies means, and what the components of freedom for web services might be."

Opponents of cloud computing cite data loss and vendor lock-in as a primary dangers of relying on such services. They're valid points, but since cloud computing isn't going away anytime soon, it's time to start finding solutions instead of simply sounding alarm bells.

Everyone wants a piece of you these days: Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing. They'll give you free e-mail, free photo storage, free web hosting, even a free date. They just want to listen in.

Is the freedom torch passing from Richard Stallman to the next generation? Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy opened the Southern California Linux Expo this year with a keynote about software as a service and user freedoms.

"We recently published the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. [...] This isn't a complete solution for bringing freedom to web services. Unfortunately, the current architecture that we use to build network applications is inherently unfriendly to users' freedom. Generally, all the code and data lives on someone else's server, under their control and out of yours. You can never be completely free in such an environment. However, AGPLv3 advances a vision of how freedom works in the computing environment of today and tomorrow..."

Free software has won: practically all of the biggest and most exciting Web companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter run on it. But it is also in danger of losing, because those same services now represent a huge threat to our freedom as a result of the vast stores of information they hold about us, and the in-depth surveillance that implies.