Thank you, Richard Stallman.  I cannot believe how many otherwise rational people trust Google with their mail and documents.  No wonder you can’t work up a critical mass of resistance to government surveillance in the US and UK.  These idiots want their mail filtered through an advertising engine and stored on a private corporation’s servers because it’s … cool?  Convenient?  What?  And the corporation has promised to “not be evil”?  Oh, OK then.  My bad.  But none for me, thanks. Those people have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits, and I find that a teeny bit incompatible with my idea of security.

The concept of using web-based programs like Google’s Gmail is “worse than stupidity”, according to a leading advocate of free software.

Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

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.

His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticised the rash of cloud computing announcements as “fashion-driven” and “complete gibberish”.

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder | Technology | guardian.co.uk.