Let's have a little midweek reality check: Almost all of us have almost no control over our own computing.

And for most of us, that fact causes very little mental or emotional distress.

Sure, we might raise hell when a few blogs get contentious about Facebook privacy, and we might shake our heads when Google gets caught collecting user data from its Street View vehicles. But even when it comes to our business practices, very few of us know or care about what it really means to have control over our online activities, identities and data.

And why should we care? Letting others control our computing is inexpensive, convenient and mostly safe... right? Have a look at what Richard Stallman has to say. He started the Free Software Foundation, and he knows a thing or two about what users should be able to do with their own apps and programs.

As a refresher in Free Software 101, Stallman believes the following four tenets hold true for all software you'd need to use to perform everyday work:

Information, such as computer software, should be freely accessible. The information should be free to modify. The information should be free to share with others. The information should be free to change and redistribute copies of the changed software.

Anything that doesn't meet those four criteria is considered proprietary software. An example of free software would be The GIMP image editor or OpenOffice document editor. Proprietary software includes programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word. We've talked in the past about how proprietary software robs users of control and freedom.

But another category of software we all know and use is software as a service (SaaS) — a web-based version of proprietary software that ships out all your data across the tubes and lets someone else do the computing for you. SaaS programs range in scope from banking software to e-mail apps, and they're typically used more by small and medium-sized businesses.

When it comes to SaaS, Stallman considers these programs worse than proprietary software. They take away freedom (as defined above), and they require that you relinquish control of your data to "the cloud," a nebulous entity that resides behind a big logo and deep inside an enormous and hypothetically secure data center. But are SaaS applications the best solution for businesses, where control over data and software modifications are even more important than to consumers?

In an essay on SaaS, Stallman writes, "The real meaning of 'cloud computing' is to suggest a devil-may-care approach towards your computing. It says, 'Don't ask questions, just trust every business without hesitation. Don't worry about who controls your computing or who holds your data. Don't check for a hook hidden inside our service before you swallow it.' In other words, 'Think like a sucker.'"

Check out what Stallman has to say in this video, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

You can check out the previous episodes from our chat with Stallman in our archives.







Note: Stallman asked that we use Ogg Theora, an open format, for encoding this video. To download the original video, go to its Wikimedia page. This video is published under a Creative Commons-No Derivatives license.