Comment by EGreg

8 years ago

How about... stop CLOUD THIS and CLOUD THAT.

Cloud means extreme centralization.

It means giving your data to a third party you don't control.

Why?

Why does our networked software have to assume a centralized topology?

In the days when developed countries had dialup, protocols (IRC, Email, etc.) were all decentralized. Today, all the famous developers live with fancy broadband internet connections and forgot what it's like to have to think about netsplits.

The result... all the software is either "online" or broken.

There shouldn't be an "online" or "offline". There should be "do I have access to server X currently?"

Why do we need Google Docs to collaborate on a document if we are all in the same classroom?

Why do we need centralized facebook server farms whose engineers post on highscalability how they enable us all to post petabytes of photos and comment to our friends?

Why do we need centralized sites to comment at all? Each thread is local to its parent.

Why does India need internet.org from facebook?

If communities could have a network that survives without an uplink to the outside world then DDOS from the global internet would just cut off that network's hosting of documents to outsiders. They'd still be able to do EVERYTHING locally - plan dinners, book a local appointment, send an email etc. and even post things out to the greater internet.

This is a future I want to see.

We already have mesh networks. We need more web based software to run these things.

That's what we are building at qbix.com btw.

7 comments

EGreg

Reply
corobo  8 years ago

Your why questions can all be answered by "It's cheaper than hiring a team to do it in-house". At the end of the day it's all about money and non-techy people are often the people in charge of the money.

  • nialv7  8 years ago

    Doesn't have to be. Services can be packed into easily deployable package. It's even easier now thanks to container technology.