Dr. Richard M. Stallman (RMS) Explains That a Free/Libre Program Running on Somebody Else's Server (e.g. Clown Computing) Leads to Freedom Deficit
From the talk he gave a few weeks ago:
THE "Clown Computing" delusion is a very harmful one. In his public talks months ago RMS refused to use the word "cloud" or to respond to questions that use this misleading/nebulous term... and - to his credit - he clearly explained why.
Weeks ago he coherently explained his views on the subject, based on his handwritten notes (pointers) rather than a spontaneous response to the Czech audience:
Now when you are doing your computing you must not entrust that to somebody else's server because users including you should have control over their own computing but you can never have control over what somebody else's server does because somebody else installs software in that computer and configures it and thus decides what computing it is going to do. So it may be useful to talk with somebody else's server as a way of communicating with her with somebody else. Servers are fine for that. If I want to publish something that I say and you want to see what I said connecting to my server stallman.org is a fine way to do it. And running a server for that purpose is a fine way of conveying the information to those who are interested. The GNU Project has its own things to say different to my personal views so it has a different server gnu.org and again it is fine for the GNU Project to use a server as a way of enabling you to see what the GNU Project has to say if you're interested. And the Free Software Foundation has another server fsf.org which gives other information about a related part of the issue of Free Software. But when it comes to doing your computer you shouldn't entrust anyone else's server, not stallman.org, not gnu.org, not fsf.org, not google.com, or apple.com, or basically any one else that sets up a server that is not you. And that person or organization's server is not your computer, it's not under your control, and so you shouldn't depend on that server to do your computing. Which means that a very wide spread architecture that is quite commonly recommended by the people who don't think about this issue is a bad way to do computing.It might be perfectly fine to use a certain Free program by running it on your computer. That way you can change it if you want. But to have the same program running on somebody else's server, and you just connect to that server, well, you can't change the version of that program that's running on that server because that server is not yours. So it's not just which program you're talking to, it's who's running it that matters in terms of your freedom. For your freedom it should be you running that free program, so you can modify it. If it's running in my server, well, that's my copy and I can modify it but you can't. At least you can't put the modifications into the copy running on my server. That's not good for your freedom.
The above starts about 08:30 (mm:ss) from the start of this video. █