[kordless]

Stallman does a good job of calling out cognitive dissonance, as do most individuals with wisdom.

The question is why are you and others "fine" with running your services on someone else's systems? I think the answer lies in what Stallman said about keeping your software and data "under your control". If someone has control of the services you use, or the data you store in those services, there exists a clear manner in which revenue can be generated, the product improved and their ability to run it better than you increased to the point they can market it as the only way to do it. In a way, the public cloud exists because people don't want to spend (or have) the time to understand how to run the services in a reliable way themselves, on their own equipment, in their own domain.

The argument becomes exactly what you hear everyone from software interns to VC parrot: I trust Amazon to run my servers better than I can.

By taking a bit of trust from a bank account, and giving it to someone else, users are able to "put off" having to understand how services and systems operate. They are, in a way, willing to ignore the fact the service and data is outside their control in some use cases that actually matter. This is what Stallman meant when he said "put a cloud in your mind".

That "cloud" is actually cognitive dissonance. Literally believing your data is safer on someone else's servers because you could never run it better than they could, while at the same time being totally OK with not having any control over where it is stored or who has access to it.

If cost (and the time associated with it) were no objection, where would you choose to run your services and store your data? If you had a choice between running it at my house and running it at your house, which would you chose?

[Frondo]

I'm fine with relying on other people because I do it for every other part of life already. I don't grow my own food, I don't produce my own medical supplies, I don't build my own wifi devices and I don't pave my own roads. No one engaged in modern western-civilization does; we all rely on everyone around us all the time to live and do things.

Cloud backup services, VPSes, photo-hosting sites, Twitter, whatever, they're the exact same thing. If something about these services isn't fair or just, the answer is to find an alternative, inform our friends and neighbors, work to change laws, etc., whatever, not just try and do it all ourselves in some pointless attempt at individualism.

If cost and time were no object, I'd pay someone else to manage every single bit of my infrastructure, and task them with the responsibility for making sure it kept working. I wouldn't ask how, it'd be their job, the thing I'm paying them for.

(If I had any knowing of the details, I probably wouldn't want them to build a server and buy colo space, though, because of the resource consumption that would imply. All that electricity for redundant server hardware to endure disk crashes and so on? What a waste!)

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

You are essentially completely strawmaning the argument ... or, more likely, not understanding anything at all.

Nobody suggests that we should give of division of labor. Got that? That's just one big fat straw man that you made up. People (like RMS) simply analyse what kind of power structure results from how specifically the division of labor currently works/where it currently seems to be headed. And then he points out where those power structures might not be in your interest, so you might want to do something about it.

So, sure, you don't grow your own food. Nobody suggests you should. People just suggest that maybe it's not in your interest to sign a contract that prevents you from buying food from anyone but Foodle Inc., even if they promise you the easiest food on planet earth. Maybe with one option out that has "migration costs" of 10000 USD attached to it. Or that it might not be in our interest to have any entity know everything about us, because that makes them a very powerful entity, with huge potential for abuse of power. Because there is a difference between your doctor knowing very private things about you and one company having a database of all of those private details of all citizens.

Also, you might not have noticed, but someone is trying to inform you that something isn't fair and just. But it seems like you aren't listening. And what people are also pointing out is that finding an alternative is not really an option if you are locked into a service affected by network effects.

[kordless]

> If cost and time were no object, I'd pay someone else to manage every single bit of my infrastructure, and task them with the responsibility for making sure it kept working. I wouldn't ask how, it'd be their job, the thing I'm paying them for.

In the hypothetical discussion we're having, I gave you unlimited time and resources. With that, you chose to let someone else to manage and control your data instead of managing and controlling it yourself, for what appears to be no gain. The logical conclusion is either a) you don't care if someone else has ALL of your data, or b) you don't understand that giving someone else your data will eventually result in the loss of control over that data over some given period of time.