Who does that server really serve? (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Who does that server really serve? (2010)

gnu.org

105 pointscnst37 comments

My problem with this article is that it is far too one sided to be a tenable argument.

It is the software equivalent of arguing that taxation is theft, without acknowledging the things government works toward (infrastructure, business development, education, healthcare, national security). Note: Before the replies flood in, I understand everyone has problems with their government. The point is that you are still receiving benefits from government investment, regardless of how good those benefits are.

I don't think anyone uses a SaaS platform without realizing that they are taking the role of customer. I am paying someone else to give me a platform that translates text so I don't have to put in the effort to set up one myself. What seems to be perpetually missing from the FOSS philosophy, especially among people who love tinkering with Linux (note: I am one of them), is a valuation of time.

I don't care about free software if it takes me hours or weeks to set up. I will gladly pay someone else who has put in the time to develop a first-class platform so that I can go home earlier or spend my time working on something else. I have the power to make more money to cover my SaaS expenses later on; nobody has the power to generate more time that they can spend doing things that make them happy.

In addition to paid SaaS(S), to which your comment applies, there are also 'free' SaaS(S), where you're not taking the role of customer at all. Instead, you're taking the role of product, or your data is. You are the product to be sold to the platform's actual customers or used to benefit the larger company in some other way (e.g. Google Photos). I don't think it's an existential problem by any means, but one has to be cognizant of this fact.

TFA seems to explicitly be about the kind of simple "give input, get output" program that you only make a SaaS to keep people from being able to continue using your software without paying you every month (or visiting your site for ad impressions, or sending you their data so you can use it to train machine learning models, or whatever). Not software that necessarily requires a server. I don't think it's in the same sort of bad syllogism category as "taxation = theft".

> I don't care about free software if it takes me hours or weeks to set up.

That's because you've made a personal choice that free software is not important to you.

Many people take public transport even though it takes them longer because they believe that, say, driving a car is bad.

Not everyone feels that way. It's not an important issue to them.

In that sense the argument revolves primarily about how much priority you assign to a particular belief (e.g. belief in free software, belief in environmentalism, etc).

Before you think I'm going on some sort of holier-than-thou rant - there's no directionality to this.

It's a fairly general thing. If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve X, even if that results in costs in other areas.

Presumably you have some goal that you think is more important than these other issues. That's the thing that has your priority - you want to spend time doing that, because you care about it more.

My point isn't that the people who care about free software are misdirected. My point is that they don't focus enough on making the free software experience painless.

Take, for example, F-Droid, the free software package manager for Android. In my opinion it is free software done right. Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to publish. At no point do you have to pop a shell and interact with a dozen low level bash executables or edit deeply nested configuration files (each written in their own markup language of choice) to Get Things Done.

> If you believe heavily in X then you'll make sacrifices in order to achieve X, even if that results in costs in other areas.

My response is that believers in X who want to make a difference will put in the effort to reduce the sacrifices others have to make to join X. As another example, consider the roles the Toyota Prius and then later the Tesla Model S/3/X played in mainstreaming the idea of owning an electric car. It wasn't that long ago that hybrid-electric cars were relegated to small columns in PopSci rather than the front page of MotorTrend. In the next few years we will see a similar transformation with vegetarianism/veganism with Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger - as soon as it costs less to make meat in a lab than it does to grow and care for livestock, you bet everyone is going to leave the cows alone. Not just for morality (although the moral argument is a powerful one), but because the alternative is simply better in every way.

If you want to be the truly superior solution, and you want people to believe in your cause, you can't expect them to make sacrifices.

There's a lot to unpick here. I'll write a brief response for now.

Ultimately I think there are two parts. You have to realise that free software advocates aren't unlimited in their power. The commercial world is far larger (likely due to feedback effects from, well, money). So there's effectively a race there that free software advocates will find it difficult to win.

Having said that, the world is literally built on this stuff. User facing software is the final, difficult, frontier, because marketing costs money, user studies cost money, AB testing costs money, and telemetry and stuff like that allow commercial entities to gain market share using practices that are incompatible with the free software ethos.

> you can't expect them to make sacrifices.

I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good (unrelated to free software; I'm talking in the general sense here) are either misguided or outright malicious.

As a strawman example: "we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice".

Because ultimately there won't always be a magical solution. I own a Tesla and I think they're great. But if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up. And that would be a sacrifice, but it would make sense to do so, because it's a personal sacrifice for a greater good.

I understand that good software costs money. All of the "evil" things listed in this article such as DRM or the SaaS business model all originated from unique attempts to make money and pay developers for their work (among other things, obviously all of this stuff also enriches shareholders and other people who don't directly contribute to the product). You can't have your free cake and afford to eat it too, per say.

There is not really a solution to this dilemma other than overthrowing capitalism entirely (which I believe will happen eventually with the rise of automation), but that might be too drastic of a change at this point in time.

>I very much do expect people to make sacrifices and I think that people who aren't willing to sacrifice for the greater good...are either misguided or outright malicious

Hey, I can agree with you here!

>"we" shouldn't need to create an electric pickup truck in order for people to stop driving 10mpg guzzlers around cities for ego reasons. We should probably just tax the hell out of it instead and require them to "sacrifice".

Agreed that we should tax them, however...this example ignores that quite a lot of people who drive pickups actually use them for their job. For example, small business owners such as plumbers or electricians benefit greatly from driving pickups that can carry their tools rather than tiny sedans or awkward SUVs.

This type of insight is also missing from other morally guided arguments such as removing all cars from cities to promote walking and biking. What do you do about snow plowing, service vehicles, delivery vehicles, etc. that modern consumers expect to cater to them directly to their households?

Making an electric pick up truck is a far better solution than taxing ICE pickups (although, again, I think that would help) because it benefits everyone without also penalizing the people who truly do need a pickup or something that can perform the role of a pickup.

In a similar way, making better free software to take market share from paid SaaS software is better than deriding SaaS companies as immoral for stepping in to make life easier for their customers. They exist for a reason and they could not survive if enough people didn't find them valuable.

> if society decided - actually we should probably not like, build roads all over the countryside and disrupt habitats - I'd be fairly happy to give it up

Well, this depends on quite a lot of factors you're leaving out. How do you leave your house without a car? How do you visit friends or family, how do you go to restaurants or grocery stores? How do you get to work if you don't work from home?

If your answer is better public transport, then that's not really a sacrifice you are making because there is an equivalent alternative that still does what you want but without the parts you perceive as bad or wrong. Sure you gave up your Tesla, but you'd only do that if you knew there was some other way to get around. I think if your alternative was literally walking or biking everywhere, I"m not sure if you'd be so excited.

> In a similar way, making better free software to take market share from paid SaaS software is better than deriding SaaS companies as immoral for stepping in to make life easier for their customers.

We can do both.

> Well, this depends on quite a lot of factors you're leaving out. How do you leave your house without a car?

The point is that if everyone does something in lockstep, e.g. via taxation or simply an agreement, then these solutions gain pressure to arise.

So again, we can do both. If ICE cars were taxed more heavily then a ton of investment naturally flows into alternative fuels, bus services, etc because suddenly there's an enormous competitive advantage.

FOSS already has the largest competitive advantage - it is literally free and accessible to anyone who has access to a computer.

That paid solutions still manage to trump many FOSS programs tells me that people value their time more than their money, and FOSS developers ought to work to develop software that takes a lot less time to do things with.

By free software, we mean libre software, not free as in beer. None of my comments have in any way related to the cost of using said software.

This line of reasoning seems to conveniently “forget” that time = money for most people.

I’ll prefer OSX or something nonfree if it saves time and is consistent. This is something that differentiates idealists / hobbyists from actual professionals.

I think you're confusing free software with 'cost-free' software. It's unfortunate that this is the terminology in use.

I'm talking specifically about libre software. I have no qualms with paying an expert for a service - in fact that's the basis of my career.

I'm happy with SaaS services that provide a paid option which means you don't have to muck about with self hosting, backups, and all of that jazz. Just works(tm). I think that's a great business model.

The issue I take is with proprietary software which limits the user in what they can do. Services which derive most of their profit from locking in the user (e.g. come and use our fancy cloud database, there's no way to run it locally, oops we just whacked up the price by 5x, suck it up)

> This is something that differentiates idealists / hobbyists from actual professionals.

Damn, my hobby is working out well then. ;)

> It is the software equivalent of arguing that taxation is theft, without acknowledging the things government works toward (infrastructure, business development, education, healthcare, national security).

It's not that, and Free Software was never against paying for software. Taxes serve common good (at least ostensibly), and you have some say about it in democratic countries. You have little control over or insight into what proprietary software does, and in particular SaaS is a tool for disenfranchising users. The way they're done, you not only can't inspect, modify and improve the software, you also don't own your data anymore.

> disenfranchising users

Given the horrifically low rates of voter turnout, I think it's perfectly clear that many people are okay being disenfranchised if it saves time or reduces stress. I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to software. Most people demonstrably want something that works, not something they're in charge of.

Until they hit a problem and then there's weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The SaaSS problem is particularly insidious at the macro scale, because services substituting for software like to embed collaboration functionality that really should be handled by separate tools (and the filesystem). The resulting network effects contribute to sucking out the oxygen from the software space, so the minority of users who like their freedoms suddenly find themselves forced to use the disenfranchising services.

Totally understand that the 6,000+ SaaS businesses are out of control and unsustainable. And unnecessary in many cases.

However, there is something odd about the GNU argument here. They have been riding a (small) wave for a long time and fear irrelevance. They get cranky if you don’t call it GNU/Linux. They basically copied Unix tools and thinking from other people, then inserted themselves into the O/S and software world, and want to be champions of “freedoms”. Fine, fine, and fine.

But it’s also fine that people don’t care. Most don’t. Most people use Gmail (and previously Yahoo Mail) and don’t want to set up their own email via Emacs, etc.

WordPress and Ubuntu are non-SaaS software (well, mostly) and are polished and easy to use. But there are for-profit aspects of those tools, too, which is partially how and why they remain sustainable.

I know searching with AWK and other tools are amazing. Supposedly. But sorry if I own a Mac and don’t go to the command line and use RegEx in AWK (or whatever GNU tool some freedom fighter says we should always use to “own” our software). I just use the very proprietary Finder or Spotlight tools that Apple built for my operating system. And some Mac owners also use software like Alfred.

This is blatantly obvious when you look at the marketplace objectively: people want simple. People do not want to spend more time learning systems and tools, but less.

If GNU wants to stay relevant, and I think that is still possible, even as their tools are rewritten and replaced in the next decade or so, they could stand to focus on attracting customers, rather than browbeating people with their philosophies. Build a better mousetrap, and all that jazz.

It does not follow that because someone chooses not to vote that they would be okay with being prevented from voting if they were to attempt doing so.

Oh, are Saas companies physically preventing you from running your own software now? Pray tell, what else are the evil saas monsters preventing you from doing?

I didn't say that, I was simply pointing out that your comparison was flawed.

That said, there is a similar dynamic at play that both drives down voter participation rates and pushes users towards proprietary software.

Citizens who elect not to vote and users who elect to use proprietary software are not making those decisions in a vacuum.

It is entirely possible to place some value on your right to vote while choosing not to do so because you’ve determined that the benefit from doing so both to you personally as well as in its ability to impact the broader system is not worth the time and energy.

Analogously, it is equally possible to place some value on open and free software while choosing to use proprietary systems for exactly the same reasons.

Lots of things in the world function in this way due to network effects and inertia, as others in this thread have explained.

For example, you might be aware that prices of goods and services are inflated by the costs associated with credit card transaction fees, while still deciding to pay with credit cards because you know that your individual decision to do so will have no impact on the price that you personally pay.

> nobody has the power to generate more time that they can spend doing things that make them happy

If can effectively recoup time if you have money; the relationship is symmetrical.

Not really. No amount of money can solve your cancer or rare degenerative muscle disease, no amount of money can prevent car accidents or fatal mistakes. No amount of money can protect everyone in your life that you care about without taking away their individual freedoms in the process.

If any of these happened to you 20 or 30 years from now, you're gonna wish you spent your time with your family or your friends rather than head-down in 32 bash terminals or something trying to administer server clusters when you could just hire some SaaS to do it for you. Unless of course you already get an ample amount of time with everyone you'd like - there's nothing wrong with tinkering for tinkering's sake, and as long as you are happy with what you are doing there's no need to change!

The scaremongering here is entirely unnecessary.

If you want to spend more time with your family, go and spend more time with your family.

They're more important than the server clusters, tinkering or no tinkering.

>If you want to spend more time with your family, go and spend more time with your family.

Not everyone has this privilege. If your job demands that you manage server clusters, then that is your livelihood. Which is exactly why outsourcing aspects of your job to other companies is so appealing, and why so many SaaS's gain virulent popularity as every other company switches to their services one by one. If I can reduce the amount of headaches I have to deal with at work, I can at least arrive at home a little more energized and ready to do fun things. Rewritten, if I can convince my boss (or my wallet) to pay some other company to do my job for me so I can sit around and do easier things, I will always prefer that choice.

> What seems to be perpetually missing from the FOSS philosophy, especially among people who love tinkering with Linux (note: I am one of them), is a valuation of time.

This is perpetually missing from SaaS evaluation as well. You have to setup AD integration, you have to learn how to administer it, you have to learn how to export your data and what to do with it in case the company disappears, you have to setup internal support and they have to be the expensive kind of support who can debug things when the SaaS provider changes things without notice, you have to have your admins setup multiple browsers because they decided not to support IE like the rest of the company, etc.

The seat charge isn't the only cost of SaaS.

I think this is from his essay collection "Free Software, Free Society." Its a great read, I wish he'd written a sequel to go into more depth on some of the topics... maybe now he'll have time to do some more writing?

> The basic point is, you can have control over a program someone else wrote (if it's free), but you can never have control over a service someone else runs, so never use a service where in principle a program would do.

If I'm reading this correctly, Richard is simply saying that SaaS(S) takes away your freedom to compute and manipulate software/data if there's a (free) program that can be run on your local computing environment.

I've never really thought of using SaaS as someone else taking away my freedom.

I understand the concept of lock-in and the possibilities that should I no longer pay the vendor then the software stops being available to me (but my data is still mine), but I don't feel my freedom is being taken away.

And isn't Richard's argument the equivalent of saying that the banking system is taking away your freedom to spend your money because you COULD setup a safe at home and store all your money in it? Some problems are hard to solve and paying someone else a nominal fee to use their platform, which solves that hard problem, isn't taking away your freedom.

> A user of the server would send her data to the server, which does her own computing on the data thus provided, then sends the results back to her or acts directly on her behalf.

Case and point: what happens when the user in this scenario is using a MacBook Air but wants to compute a large sum of data using a complex, time consuming algorithm? Go out and buy a cluster of systems to maintain software freedom, or pay AWS for some services (they likely offer), SaaSS if you like, to do it for you in 10 minutes for $0.45?

If anything such services are giving you more time and money, and therefore freedom.

EDIT: added in example of a hard problem

I think you missed the point.

For example, any SaaS can have a feature and decide to remove it, for whatever reason, and that results in a loss of freedom to you. For a concrete example, let's say that Github suddenly wants to add ads to their platform and because some people read and write issue posts with email, they decide to remove that feature so they'll be pushed to use the web interface and see the ads. That wouldn't be possible if the platform wasn't a SaaS.

Just being forced to see ads is a loss of freedom. Software should only serve the user, not do stuff like impose ads on them. Nobody is arguing against paying the software developers, just against not being in control of the software.

> Case and point: what happens when the user in this scenario is using a MacBook Air but wants to compute a large sum of data using a complex, time consuming algorithm? Go out and buy a cluster of systems to maintain software freedom, or pay AWS for some services (they likely offer), SaaSS if you like, to do it for you in 10 minutes for $0.45?

I don't think the argument is against the use of VPSes, but rather against the running of code you can't inspect/modify/control, in the case of SaaS because the code is not running on a machine you control. I imagine that RMS isn't against the use of VPSes where you have control of the code running. So, yeah, rent that AWS VPS, nobody is arguing against it. And if you can self-host a SaaS program (well it might not count as SaaS anymore) on a VPS you're renting, then there's no problem with that either, as long as you have control of the code.

"If you rent a server (real or virtual), whose software load you have control over, that's not SaaSS. In SaaSS, someone else decides what software runs on the server and therefore controls the computing it does for you. In the case where you install the software on the server, you control what computing it does for you. Thus, the rented server is virtually your computer. For this issue, it counts as yours."

I'm most curious about applying this distinction to the computing environment today. According to the author it seems Amazon EC2 wouldn't be considered a SaaSS, but Amazon Serverless would? After all you don't control the software loaded in a "serverless" environment, only the business logic. Yet both are hosted in and maintained by Amazon. Amazon, for all intents and purposes, has access to the data coming in and out of there in both cases. So does the distinction hold true, and if it does does it not damage the value of making such a distinction?

Interesting take on the entire thing (though from 2010). I think things have changed a bit regarding the possibilities of hosting on not-your-computer.

I still agree with the premise that if you want control over something you use you should have it on your own computer, if you care less about that then a service is fine. I won't cross into dictating what others can do with my software or in the case of this article how they should buy their software.

Something weird about Stallman is that he has a special FOSS exemption for his microwave software, because it's an "appliance", not a "general purpose computer", but he doesn't grant the same exemption to cloud computing and web apps for some reason.

I suppose these articles aren't timestamped on purpose, but that is really annoying.

From the bottom of the page:

Updated: $Date: 2018/12/15 14:02:39 $

Interesting... one does not expect the timestamp to be there!

That was the traditional place to put it in the 90’s IIRC. Although I seem to remember seeing Updated snips under the title as well sometimes.

I think that's an old CVS/SVN trick that didn't come forward into git.

There's a token pattern you can put into files that gets updated at commit time.

the article was published March 18th 2010 in the Boston Review. I don't think the omission is deliberate, I think it is a mistake.

Did the mention of "Windows Media Player" gave it up? :-)

I think they're written in a neutral tone which is supposed to withstand the test of time, plus edited for corrections, but I do agree that it'd be nice to dates for some context.

(It would appear that the original article was published in 2010.)

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