You mean a career in IT isn't about reading /. all day? Man, this sucks!

To put sensitive data in something as nebulous as a cloud, you deserve whatever you get. I wouldn't put financial or other personal data in there willingly. Once you open Pandora's box by giving away your data you can't close it. Public is public. Private is private. The chance of a hacker targeting joe cable modem vs "the cloud" is so tiny I'll take my chances protecting my data myself any day. Besides, once your data is there, you have no guarantees whatsoever. You're at their mercy because they already have your data. You think they will scrub your data securely if you ask? Heck no, and even if they did, what about the backup tapes... Yeah, sure we'll secure erase just your stuff from the 30 sets of backups we keep. No problem.

It cuts both ways. It's both good and bad. Yes, corporate ownership is a great thing, and it speaks well that companies such as IBM, Sun, Google, and Oracle show interest in open source. It may help suit and tie wearers to understand that open source != hobby quality software. But on the down side, if big company decides that it's roadmap for former open source project is where it's going, regardless of the desires of the users, well it could sour people on the product pretty quick. Even though it's open source still, the product could be forced don a path it's users don't want. Replace the community with a pair of corporate blinders and it's a problem. Sure you can fork and all that jazz. Nothing is the end really, but corporate acquisition can be a boon or a thorn for people that just want to use a product. Depending on the product, your user base may be mostly "users" anyway. I'm no expert, but I'd imagine *successfully* forking something like MySQL isn't something you could just do overnight. There's way more to forking than just checking in the code.

To learning techniques and methodologies that can be applied to an activity regardless the tool you use? The thought that if you know how to use a product you are somehow valuable in the product's field is crazy. There's a big difference in knowing how to apply a filter in a photo program and knowing which filter is the correct one for a given situation. I'm sorry, but I think the education systems in this country have gone way too far with the "learn a product" not a skill mentality. I don't know when it happened, but whoever decided learning how to use photoshop (or another product) is more important than learning the artistic theory behind why you would use it in the first place really needs to be slapped with a dead fish. The tool is a means to an end. Tools, like artistic mediums are interchangeable. To say that an artist won't be successful because he didn't use oil paint and everyone else does is just as stupid as the argument that if you don't learn product X you will face problems.