Episode: 635
Title: HPR0635: Cloudy Predictions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0635/hpr0635.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:13:13

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Hello, this is Dismal Science reporting for the first time to hacker public radio.
I want to release a series of casts mostly concerning topics on economics and open source
software.
It's something that I think a lot of us don't think about enough.
Really what are the incentives behind what goes on?
Just a little bit about myself.
I'm a long time Linux user going on about a decade.
Debian is my poison of choice.
I actually don't use any Windows oriented software and I probably also won't take a job.
Unless I'm allowed to use Linux.
Why?
Because to keep things abrupt, not using Linux is just not very intelligent.
And I'll probably release another audio cast on that at some point.
But what I really want to talk about today is the concept of cloud computing,
particularly externally hosted outsourced cloud computing solutions.
And why this might not be the best choice for you or your company or your
church or organization to really adopt this new model.
First of all, let's try to get some type of definition of what we're talking about.
In my case, what was the first cloud product I used that was external?
Hotmail.
My first email address with a Hotmail account.
And the ironic part about it is that you really don't own any part of that account.
Really, it's implied that you do, but you don't.
I sense of change should 20 different email addresses and I didn't own any of them.
Until a few years ago when I actually bought my domain name.
Yes, if you decide to leave Hotmail, you're at hotmail.com address belongs to Hotmail.
You're not guaranteed a way to export or migrate any of the services associated with that account.
And there's no guarantee that they have to even continue offering it.
Let me give you another example.
Years ago, I had an e-trade account and at the time,
e-trade thought it was a good idea to incorporate email into their service.
I was a big e-trade user at the time and thought that that would be so convenient to use
e-trade email along with their stock trading platform.
One day, when I went to log into my e-trade account, the email option was just gone.
Just literally gone.
And, you know, I called e-trade about it and really the customer service people didn't even know
that e-trade offered an e-mail option.
Somebody made a decision one day that the service was going to not exist and I had to migrate abruptly.
Let's look at another situation.
Let's look at delicious, the recent delicious controversy.
Delicious was a company that had a fairly promising product, this social bookmarking concept.
I actually got my mother onto it because she needed an effective way to manage her bookmarks
as I kept reformatting computers, destroying the bookmark saved in Firefox.
She needed to have a way to manage this and she managed it through the cloud on somebody else's
servers and who is somebody else's permission.
Well, delicious was a fairly reasonable service.
Yahoo bought them and abruptly stopped investing in them.
If you look at the delicious website, it hasn't updated in years.
But more relevant is the fact that delicious is no longer going to be a service.
Yahoo executives have determined that delicious is not a valuable property and will be sold or
dismantled along with all of the accounts and settings and configuration that its users might
have contributed to over the years. These are simple examples, right? We just keep hopping from
services to services because really that's what we've been trained to do.
One of the more dangerous situations, and I'm a big Google fan. I think Google has done
tremendously good work. Their products are very well engineered.
But we're beginning the process of depending on Google in the same kind of fashion.
Now we're going to migrate our delicious bookmarks to Google bookmarks and the hope that they
are going to maintain all of the various services that they are giving us for free in many cases.
These services are not free to deliver. Of course, my whole rant follows a parallel of what Richard
Stallman has been talking about. None of this stuff is free. Google has infrastructure all over the
world, real estate and computer systems, electricity costs to deliver all of these
reader products and mail products to you. And really, Google has been good about it because
they are flush with money right now. Will they be flush with money in a few years? We don't know.
Once upon a time, Yahoo was flush with money, and that's certainly not the case today.
I wish Google the best, but we cannot really be guaranteed that Google is going to always have
as much resources as they have today. So, what am I really ultimately saying is
for businesses who want to now move to cloud computing, you've got a similar problem. Cloud storage,
cloud ticketing systems, cloud, wikis. I saw a product that I thought was pretty cool. I went
to Atlassian's website. Atlassian is a software company from Australia. They make a number of
nifty tools. If you're too lazy to actually install their software, they now have a cloud solution
where you can sign up for account and they will host their software for you, just in case you don't
want to administer machines or install software. Well, is that a good idea? Maybe it's a cool kind of,
but in reality, you're completely at the Beckin Wim of Atlassian. We know, by the nature of
economic cycles, that the fortunes of all of these companies go up and down with time, and
do you really want to be stuck having some essential service effectively outsourced
and have to be in a position where you have to migrate rapidly to yet another solution that
you really don't control. By now, you're probably asking yourself, why am I listening to this guy?
What is he actually saying? Get to the point. Well, let me get to the point.
The point is what I'm telling you guys is you really need to consider running your own cloud.
Cloud computing is good, but you have to control it. Run your own cloud. This is not hard.
I am a person of medium technical capacity, so I mean, if I can do it, most of you guys can do it.
If you need technical services, if you find services are becoming valuable to you,
host them yourself. Give me an example. Looking now to migrate from delicious, I have realized there
are many great open source replicas of delicious that you can host yourself. I'll talk about one
today. It's called insipid, and it is a solution that runs like a common lamp stack written in
pearl. You can use it with mySQL or Postgres, but effectively, you can run your own bookmarking
service. To me, this is really important because the web is huge and we do not want to lose
our place when bookmarking. We want to remember that tutorial that we thought was so good.
We want to remember that ranking or that newspaper article that we thought was so good so that we
can reference it. Insipid allows you to do this, and not only that, it comes, the creators of
insipid have created a Firefox plugin in case Firefox is your browser of choice. So you can really
use this insipid service exactly like a delicious service, and you will never need to migrate again.
You can migrate if you want to migrate, but you will not be forced to migrate and hidden fees or
charges will never show up to your doorstep. Ultimately, all of these cloud providers are going to
have to start charging somehow, just like delicious. Delicious could not continue to be a business
model or business line without revenues. I mean, there were engineers employed to deliver this,
and goodwill can only go so far. Really, what we need to do is back the strong open source projects
and effectively do most of what we need ourselves. This economic cycle is going to prove a lot of
things. By the time we're done with this depression or recession or whatever they call it, we're going
to find companies treating us in a very more harsh kind of fashion. The days I'm predicting that
the days of companies giving away a lot of free services, particularly ones that continuously
cost them money, like hosting your free accounts, those days are probably not going to continue.
That's just a prediction of mine I could be wrong, but I'm thinking that a lot of these
services are going to start converting to more for cost service, or they're just going to disappear.
I'll give you an example, Hotmail. That one might not be around too much longer. Hotmail,
I just heard on the news that they lost some number of accounts. I just don't know how
interested Microsoft is investing in Hotmail. It's not hot anymore.
This is more or less the conclusion to this audio cast. Let me know what you thought.
You can reach me at dismal.science.hpr at gmail.com. Once again, that's dismal.science.hpr at gmail.com.
Dismal.science is going to be my name going forward as it refers to the economic nature of the
cast that I will be producing. Thanks again, and thank you, Ken, for keeping this hacker public
radio effort going strong.
Thank you for listening to Hack with Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by caro.net.
So head on over to C-A-R-O dot-E-T for all of us in need.
