• The Guardian, Tuesday, September 30, 2008 1 PM

Cloud computing--where programs are delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer--has gained currency in recent years and is backed by large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

But Richard Stallman, founder of the New York-based 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 growing number of people storing information on internet-accessible servers rather than on their own computers has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies such as Google. But there has been growing concern that mainstream adoption of cloud computing could present a mixture of privacy and ownership issues, with users potentially being locked out of their own files.

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