I've always thought that Stallman was "out there", but he's demonstrated today that he's just completely nuts - he wants people to eschew free cloud services and use "freedom respecting software". Yeah Richard, sure - can I get a hairshirt with that, too? Here's Stallman:

"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian.

...

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

Sure, because everyone backs up religiously, right? The sad reality is this: the first regular backup system many of us have taken to using is Time Machine, because it's there and it works. LIkewise, free services (like gmail) are there and they work. Stallman needs to find a razor first, and then talk to some real people who don't live and breath software development. After that, he might ponder what it means that he's on the same side of this argument as Ballmer and Ellison. And this is just precious:

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

The non-technical person using Linux is just as much at risk. Sure, the source is available - fat lot of good that does for the vast majority of non-programming people with lives that involve things other than "Make clean".