Life Is Rich

I’ve never been terribly quiet about my distrust for the large corporation – especially those who wish to replace the services and data available on my computer with a server-side variant with both the application and data residing on said server.

Here is another example of why you don’t want to freely turn your data over to a “benevolent” corporation. In summary, Adobe offered this great new online variant of its Photoshop product, extensibly for “free”. The only problem was that it was fairly unclear whether by using this online application, any photos or work you modified or created with said application may now belong to Adobe (or at least certain rights of use). Wow. Evil.

They’ve fortunately thought better of it (after a huge public outcry) and modified their EULA/TOS. Intentional or not, this is cause for alarm. Honestly, crazy license agreements can and do exist for applications that you run on your own computer. Unfortunately, online applications and data storage just have a much easier and more likely opportunity to make off with your data and privacy.

In other words, you will have to pry my Personal Computer from my cold dead hands.

I’ve commented pretty extensively about the problems facing the oft-proclaimed panacea of open-source (parts 1, 2, 3), and in particular, the GPL.

The GPL crew is crawling out of the woodwork to denounce Sun’s announcement that some parts of the MySQL source code base will be closed and no longer open-sourced (in reality, actually a very small amount – some backup software particularly). The ignorance of licensing and why a company hides its greed behind the noble face of GPL is lost on many unfortunately.

A Slashdot user named martenmickos claiming to be the actual Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL and now SVP at Sun has a very interesting explanation of the reasons. They have to make money. This actually makes some sense and is very likely authentic. My problem with GPL is the deceptiveness of a corporations primary goal – “give away” software with an archaic restrictive license (GPL) then charge for the ability to actually use it under a more reasonable license – all the while taking ownership of the charitable work of others. Why can’t they just be honest? Why couch it in “we’re better than those people who believe the efforts of developers have intrinsic value”, then take those efforts and sell them back in a dark alley? Why foster a community that lashes out at anyone who wishes to make a fair wage from software development then actually profit from the charity of others? Because apparently it works.

Ah well. I don’t particularly like Sun, but maybe they are at least being a little bit more honest about their purchase. Maybe those supporters of Open Source “companies” will think a little better about it. Stop kidding yourselves. It’s not open or free, and it’s certainly not noble.

This will be a bit more technical than most of my posts, but still a topic worthy of being addressed even for the most technically averse – the life-saving backup. Computer backup of course. I’ve taken a three prong approach to the problem. Fortunately, they come in different varieties of technical complexity. In other words, Dad – you can handle the first method. For the more technical savvy, you can probably handle methods one and two. And for the masochists and command-line junkies, section three covers my favorite tool of yore. The first two are short and sweet – the fun times are in the third.

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