I felt so excited to see Plug. I was ready to sign up to Kickstarter to back my first product. It's a plug-and-play NAS, a data solution I've been trying to find. I really, really wanted to use it. But I can't for ethical reasons.
I hate to sound like I'm preaching open-source but it's unacceptable anymore, although I will give them credit that it's a step in the right direction. We need devices like Plug. Just make them open and I'll happily back it.
Why feel bad about it? It gets straight to the crux of the problem. If you're running closed-source software that is presumably taking updates from a third party outside your control, how much of an improvement is that over SkyDrive or Dropbox?
As far as I can tell the only problem with these services is snooping by intelligence agencies and the consequences of that (potential espionage, etc.). One could hypothetically argue that the NSA would be less willing or capable to snoop on data that is stored inside hard drives in citizens' houses - but from the outside we can never know that.
We need to have pretty damn good confidence that we have control over our own gear and data, and that means using open source software that is popular or interesting enough for third parties to review it.
> One could hypothetically argue that the NSA would be less willing or capable to snoop on data that is stored inside hard drives in citizens' houses
No, even the secret FISA court would have a hard time getting access to this device without a warrant:
Courts have ruled that "cloud storage" (not owned or controlled by you) is not in "your possession". Therefore, the 4th amendment protection against "unreasonable searches of your possessions" doesn't apply. So the government can ask MicroSoft/Apple/Google for your files.
But this drive is clearly in your possession. The keys for it are clearly in your possession. The cloud company website does not do security or have access to your files -- it just helps you locate your device.
Technically, this is no different than a NAS in your house. But the client-side software is 100 times better. (client-side caching, revision tracking, etc.)
My experience with open-source software is somewhat a love/hate relationship. Most of the tools I use (vim, nginx, go, etc...) are amazingly high quality but others are seemingly poor - i.e GIMP vs Photoshop, Pages/Word vs LibreOffice Writer. They look pretty awful, they have unintuitive UIs and generally I have a bad time using them. As such, my attitude towards open-source software is it's "shit" because it looks terrible. The code may be solid but the UX hasn't been refined. This is the main reason why I run OS X; I get to use vim and Photoshop.
In some small way, I feel like I'm forced to use software I genuinely do not enjoy using. I like using Windows and I like using OS X. So far, every Linux distro has forced me back to either OS within a few weeks. Even Elementary OS; practically a clone of OS X ships with sub-par software.
Almost all software I run is closed-source/proprietary. I'm making an effort to adopt better software but it's difficult to find high-quality open-source software. I'm currently looking into contributing so I am actively working on the issue rather than sitting here complaining.
A common love/hate relationship I think; don't beat yourself up too much.
I think it's okay and even important to insist on open-source for a system like Plug even if you're not interested in using FOSS for all your computing. For many of the proprietary software examples you cited the "loss of freedom" is kind of nebulous (apart from the price tag!). The odds of a backdoor appearing in a product like Photoshop are relatively slim I think.
By comparison Plug is a perfect target - it is hosting documents and other data belonging to users who have likely made a conscious decision not to store it on the cloud. I don't think it's hypocritical to own a Mac and say that closed-source is not the right model for this application.
What are you talking about? Quote from the kickstarter:
"Under the hood, the average transfer speed for your data will be around 30Mb/s"
That is megabits/s, pretty far from 100mbps. At home between my boxes I've got 1Gbps, why should I be unable to utilise that speed? That's just another argument to why it should be Free Software so I/we can run it on any hardware.
