Is AT&T Building the Ultimate Walled Garden? 102
itwbennett writes "The announcement earlier this week that AT&T joined OpenStack was greeted with much fanfare (of the 'woo hoo for open source' variety). But dig into why AT&T decided to sign up for OpenStack and things get a lot more interesting. 'AT&T is about to take on Amazon's EC2 and S2 cloud services, and OpenStack's technology is going to be the engine that drives it,' writes blogger Brian Profit. 'Leaving aside the potential problems for user privacy here — and oh, there are many to be addressed to be sure — a plan such as this would represent a stunning coup for AT&T, since they would be able to provide the one thing Apple and Google have not been able to have in their respective plans to own the entire stack: the network on which all communications must flow.'"
Re:How is this different? (Score:5, Insightful)
As if all other companies were honest, and they don't have a very dark side. Troll harder
I'm confused (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How is this different? (Score:2, Insightful)
Go away, troll. Nobody is going to read a post that long full of one-sided astroturf, so all you're succeeding in doing is inhibiting people from having a discussion about the actual subject of the article.
missing an important part (Score:5, Insightful)
Backup will be easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
... Just ask the friendly NSA guy in the datacenter for a copy of your data.
Seriously, would anyone trust their (cloud) data to T after the NSA thing?
In doubt... (Score:5, Insightful)
To be on the safe side we should all probably always use AGPL and/or GPLv3 for everything. We can always go less restrictive, but motherfuckers will want to pervert the idea of sharing and openness, so just go full RMS from the start and loosen the restraints as you go along, if appropriate.
That's just 2 cents that happened to drop into my drunken brain at this period in history, and they seem like they're making sense.
Re:Screw AT&T, I could care less what they do (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are you proud about your phone not being subsidized. You paid the same whether it was or not. AT&T does not discount for providing your own phone.
And you brought a phone that actually requires a data plan (how do you think visual voicemail works?). Now you have the audacity to blame AT&T for your blatant stupidity. Now I am not saying They do no wrong, believe me they, when they suck they fucking suck, but your rant says far more about you than it does AT&T.
Re:Screw AT&T, I could care less what they do (Score:5, Insightful)
When you get to your new provider, you will see that sometimes having "a choice" is really no choice at all. When there's only a couple of players, and they're all trying to buy one another, they realize they've got you over a barrel.
You can try to find the provider that is least objectionable, but you will find that there is no such thing as a telecommunications provider in the United States that is not horrible. You might come to believe one is a little bit less horrible than the other, but when you come down to it, they're all shit. And they can be shit because they got big enough to be able to write the government regulations themselves.
If you want to see corporate behavior start to change, you have to support a constitutional amendment stating that money does not equal speech and corporations are not people. One would think that those two statements are so obvious that no such amendment is necessary, but there's so much money in so few hands right now that they're able to repeatedly fuck the corpse of the Constitution, over and over, until it will say anything they want it to say.
I really don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet another fail for IT World as far as I can tell; I haven't read a single good or informative article from that site.
When I think "walled garden", I think all services work on a single, proprietary platform, and that platform is owned by one company that controls what services are allowed with that platform, and what services are not. So unless AT&T owned every cable in the world (or even every cable in the US), which they don't, and even if every cable in the world used a communications protocol owned by AT&T (which isn't the case) then there is no platform, and so there can't be any walled garden.
So this Brian Proffitt guy has blown things out of proportion. A better headline would have been, "AT&T Plans to Throw its Hat into the Cloud Computing Ring." This isn't a walled garden, it is more like, "Hey, we have built large systems interconnected computers before, lets do it again with the lovable OpenStack running on top of it and sell it to guys who want cloud services!"