[tlug] MS vs Google (was: Buying a Blackberry in Japan (OT))

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Attila Kinali writes:

 > Google tries to dominate us with data.
 > They are locking up our data within their servers
 > and take away the control of the data.

Nonsense.  That would get them in heap big trouble, at least in the
U.S.  Anyway, that's not Google's business model.

What Google is doing is data mining, and selling what they find out to
both sides of the market (ie, more accurate search results for users,
and marketing info to vendors).

This may be more scary than Echelon, and more scary even than Jedgar
Hoover's famous files.  But then again, it may not.

 > While the processing of the is still done to some extend on our
 > computers, with our programs, Google is taking more and more of the
 > processing pie using their code.  Yes, they are
 > GPL/BSD/Apache/.. licensed, but it's not the code _we_ wrote. It's
 > not the code someone else wrote.  It's the code a single entity
 > wrote!

So was Emacs.  So was the Linux kernel.  So is OpenOffice.  It's not
the authorship of free software that matters, it's what we can do with
it.

 > Not to mention how data and programs are handled on the web search
 > engine, gmail, gwave,... where both the code and the data is
 > already past our reach.

Indeed, that's something to think about.  But it's not the code and
it's not the data per se that you should point to.  It's the
correlations that only Google will have access to.