I have always felt that the best type of business was a "win-win-win" situation: The community of project and product producers should win, vendors of the projects and products should win, and, most of all, the end-user customers should win.

Many cloud solutions have central ownership by a large company that builds a server farm and sells hardware, software, or "platform" services to customers. Sometimes those sales are for money, sometimes for access to your information for marketing, and sometimes a combination of the two, but it is the end user who gives up something for access to the computer resources that they need. Almost always the end user has no control over where their data is stored, where their programs execute, or what programs they are executing. Because of a lack of control, the end user sometimes experiences charges that could be called "the end of the month surprise."

Without ownership of the resources, coupled with a lack of control, your data might fall under the laws of a country other than your own. Although your country's laws might protect you, another country's laws could expose your data for use, with no ability for you to change those laws by any means.

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