Open Source Tools

I prefer open source software but I’m not an absolutist. I no longer
have much interest in patching my OS, for example, so I feel
comfortable using macOS because the eco-system—or walled garden, if
you prefer—allows me to integrate my tools and workflow across my
various devices easily.

I do insist on one principal, however: I never commit my data to
proprietary software and especially not software that runs as a
service on someone else’s computer. As I’ve said before, if Apple were
to go out of business tomorrow, it would take me less than a day to
move everything over to Linux and be back up and running with no
loss of data. Mostly I do that by keeping my data as plain text except
for things like PDFs, music, and pictures where there are open source
applications to deal with them.

What I don’t understand are people who are willing to commit their
only copy of important data to things like Google Docs¹. Some of these
people are writers and others who literally commit their livelihood to
the vicissitudes of Google’s plan-of-the-day for world domination.
Just when you have a comfortable workflow established, the service
provider decides to end-of-life an important cog in that workflow.

It gets worse though. Companies like Google have shown themselves to
be unreliable custodians of your data. Even if you’re willing to pay
the privacy costs for those “free” services, why would you risk having
your data held captive because the provider of that service doesn’t
like your data?

Think that’s an exaggeration or won’t happen? Consider the case of
Dennis Cooper, an artist, who lost 14 years of writing, research, and
pictures when Google decided it didn’t like his blog on Blogger and
deleted his account. That included Gmail and his contact list.

More recently, several users have had their Google Docs accounts
frozen because Google decided, mistakenly it turns out, that they
contained disagreeable material. Again, these were professional
writers who had their work product sequestered because Google thought
they might be guilty of BadThink™.

You can say, and rightfully so, that these people were stupid and got
what they deserved but it’s astounding how often I see presumably
technically competent folks blithely admitting—or even boasting—that
they use Google Docs or some other similar service to hold their
important data. Please don’t do that. There are plenty of other
great solutions available that don’t put your data at risk.