Keep your own tame cloud

Well, a customized version would. At least as long as the device lets you install your own firmware, and your ISP doesn't filter the traffic too much. Google is very close to the line on those, while still trying to do something new. We should all watch the freedom of ChromeOS devices closely.

Eucalyptus is indeed an excellent example of open source software supporting cloud freedom. I hadn't heard of Pogoplug before, but it looks like an arm linux fileserver with a proprietary web service for nat and firewall traversal. A neat product, but it seems to offer less data freedom than Chrome OS, where at least the client is open source.

I've been hearing a lot of "curated computing is bad for freedom" lately. I don't think that's a useful way to think about the problem. We all rely on upstream feeds for software and the hardware it runs on. A "curated" collection of software intended to work together, and to update itself with fixes and new features is exactly what the traditional GNU/Linux distributions offer. It's not practical to select, build, and integrate everything oneself; ultimately you have to trust other people's work. The great value of open source is in making this process transparent and reconfigurable.

What's bad about some cloud services is lack of choice and vendor lock-in, just like it was with earlier software eras. What is important for freedom is that we be able to choose between alternatives, and make our own decisions on whose services and update feeds to follow, and what we want to do for ourselves and others.

As said by others, even if these products are great (I haven't heard about them before), I'll bet they are not easy to manage.
What we do need is "something" which would be a breeze to install (say, like Ubuntu) and would be able out-of-the-box to keep a local copy of your data from Google (or other cloud-based providers). it must work with any (or at least most) hw/sw/network configuration, e.g. any cable modem/router/carrier.
I think Google would be happy to support this, given that they have the data liberation project. Optionally, that box should be able to let me do same things that Google services does (I'm sure Google would *not* be happy about this part - maybe the "private" way could be a very crippled user experience to keep them happier?) including sharing with other Google users.

For a single users, or even a family or small community, what Google offers is not out of reach of a single server: 8GB of email? 1GB of pictures? Upgrade all Google Storage to 200 GB for $50.00 USD per year? What about the $62 1.5TB hard disk that I just bought? Even if it dies every year it would be cheaper (but there must be a backup). I wouldn't bother about flooding, hurricanes, and the likes, relying on Google itself for those.

The problem would be maintaining such a box, including connectivity: my gmail email address was down only twice, for just tens of minutes, in its 5 years life (and one was right after the terrorist attack in London - while I was in Europe). My company email server is down at least 48 hours per year and my own machine is down much more than that, so I'd like to have this box as a data liberation backup, but not really in production (what if it crashes while I'm in a business trip oversea?) But it should provide production options for people wanting to do so.

Maybe Google (ehm, I mean Apache) Wave would be the technology that'll make this possible?