If you're fortunate enough to live near New York City, you can catch Eben Moglen at the NY Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-NY) on Friday, talking about "Freedom in the Cloud." Specifically, Moglen will be talking about the implications of "cloud computing" on software freedom, privacy, and security. Cloud computing does pose quite a few challenges for software freedom.

Cloud computing provides a lot of great experiences, but being in control of your cloud applications and hosting your own gives end users the benefits of cloud applications, and security of controlling their own data and using open-source software!

2010 is definitely the year of the cloud, The IT world is abuzz with the benefits of cloud computing and rightfully so. Cloud computing, the logical extension of network storage and virtualization, is probably the biggest IT leap forward since pervasive use of the Internet. Despite the buzz all that glitters isn’t gold.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses it. Elastichosts uses it. Google uses it. Yahoo uses it. Engine Yard uses it. Facebook uses it. "It" is Linux, of course. But what else do all these companies have in common? If you said "cloud technology," you're correct.

The cloud isn't just a buzzword for Canonical. For the Ubuntu Linux vendor, the cloud is a technology that its users are actually deploying, and it's got the numbers to prove it.

Despite warnings about loss of privacy, security, reliability, and accountability, vendors are in a headlong rush into the "cloud" and reduce computing to something like the old-fashioned telephone network: smart network, dumb user interfaces. Red Hat is positioning itself to jump on the cloud bandwagon; is it any better when it's an open source company?

Knowing that these are part of the service agreement, why would anyone want to own a Cr-48? I understand that a significant percentage of potential buyers will not care, but I do, and that is why I will never own one, when it goes on sale. Not that Google’s executives care one bit whether a blogger buys their latest gadget or not, but it’s about my privacy, not theirs.

I'm out at JavaOne in San Francisco this week and one discussion I've heard popping up with some regularity is, "Do we need to do something to protect open source in a cloud computing world?" I've written about aspects of this topic at length previously.

Cloudera is releasing a Linux distro for Hadoop, the cloud-computing technology behind Facebook, Google and others. Cloudera's Hadoop is aimed at regular enterprise data centers.