Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.

I worry that quickly this will follow this path:

• Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
• Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
• Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
• The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
• They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.