Who Does That Server Really Serve?
gnu.org
gnu.org
Of course you could say the same about Edison or Maxwell, but that's roughly the right magnitude. Hating on Stallman as a person is not very elegant, hating him for the wrong reasons (at a glance, I spot: jealousy, misunderstanding, claims of irrelevancy and so on) is not productive either.
If you're going to criticize criticize the particulars of the linked article rather than the man. Thanks.
On topic: In case you didn't get it: the article (rightly) identifies software-as-a-service as a threat to open source, it allows companies that in the past would have shipped binaries and would have been compelled by the GPL to release their sources to do an end-run around all this so they can charge you for their software without ever having to release anything. That's a valid point and plenty of examples exist in the world today.
How serious this is is not for me to say but I do note an ever increasing trend towards lock-in and a more asymmetric internet which seems to draw a line between the 'haves' (the owners of infrastructure and services) and the 'have nots' (the users, smaller businesses). Ever larger chunks of a business operation are running on hardware and software even the business owners have no control over, stuff they couldn't keep alive even if their business depended on it. This sort of inter-dependency is exactly what we should be trying to avoid because it means that you are simply no longer in control, either because you don't have access to all the code that powers your business or because your code is only a minor extension to a bunch of black box code that you can not review or inspect on a machine that might be running all kinds of nefarious stuff besides what you think it is doing and that might come back to bite you one day.
[1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/nsa_operation...
This is why I release all my own software under the AGPL.[1][2]
I also try to avoid using SaaS as much as possible. But this is going to remain very difficult until fully decentralized, peer-to-peer communication networks become widespread.
As long as centralized forums like HN, centralized mail services like GMail, and centralized social networks like Facebook dominate, it's going to be hard for you to keep your data out of their hands without refusing to participate in electronic communication at all. While any sort of data, from email to TCP packets, flows from your own machine through others outside your control, this will remain the case.
Complete freedom will require complete isolation. Anything less will be a compromise. Everyone will have to determine where they draw the line for themselves.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
John Walker was pretty prescient when he wrote that.
(and in case you don't know who he is: he founded Autodesk).
Do you think they ever will? There's not much financial incentive for companies to embrace decentralized p2p and there's a clear financial incentive for SaaS. Until that situation reverses itself, we have a problem.
This thread could be a case study in debunking the claim that programmers are more logical and less prone to emotional manipulation than other humans. From everything I've seen, programmers are actually more emotionally sensitive than the rest of the population and thus are more susceptible to emotional arguments than logical ones. After all, logic we can trace and refute. It's harder to refute feelbad.
The same argument would imply that you shouldn't do computing on VPSes or similar services that other people own. This might be strictly true, but the alternative for lots of people is that they just won't be doing that computing. At least with free software, we can say that it's usually monetarily cheaper than proprietary software. Buying and running your own server is much more expensive than running an EC2 box for pennies per hour. A lot of people's first introduction to free operating systems, these days, tends to be on a remote server instead of their personal computer. I don't think we should halt that.
The same argument would imply that you shouldn't use the email or shell account from your university, and you should self-host. While I actually do believe that to some extent, I get the feeling that Richard doesn't.
And even if you do end up self-hosting everything, chances are you won't be responding to security issues as quickly as a full-time team of professionals on call. At that point, anyone who wants to take your freedom can do so. This doesn't seem like a win.
I appreciate the goal, but we have a long way to go to the day when this becomes the right advice.
Imagine that that server is controlled by your worst enemy.
Still okay with using it? If so thats good evidence that you can just go ahead. If not, ... well, it gets harder because how do you know your worst enemy doesn't or won't gain control of it? (What? your worst enemy is the neighbour's chihuahua and Amazon doesn't hire dogs?)
WRT the costs there, I'm not sure that really follows. At least on the high end EC2 is phenomenally expensive if your load is predictable, it's interesting when you can't predict it. The large high cpu instances basically pay for the hardware in a couple months worth of use. Small instances are low performing to the point that a $35 quad core arm or $50 atom device is competitive. Surely there are cases where EC2 is cheaper, but "not computing at all" sounds like an exaggeration.
You're forgetting the "Amazon data center connectivity", "can scale up or down at will", and "someone else's problem if the hardware fails" parts. Those things are not free.
IMHO, it' a bell curve. Before a certain point and past another threshold the "cloud" is more expansive than it's worth. Adapting your application/system to a IaaS or a PaaS model isn't free either.
I don't think he saying that exactly. I think is more of a consider who has the control of the data .
For example. I worked for a company that monitored power use circuit but circuit. The data was uploaded to our servers and processed by our software. All very convenient. You could download some of the raw data, but generally small chunks. (minute by minute, day by day). You stopped paying and you lost functionality.
This is a similar problem with user generated fitness data. Some "Services" don't make it easy to take your data with you.
VPSs you generally have more control, and can just dump your data and move to another provider.
By my reading of the argument, they might not have a problem with VPS. First, the software on a VPS can be completely free (Linux). Second, it's not computing you would do on your own (short of buying a fiber connection and racked servers), and this is their argument for why a search engine might not be SaaSS.
As an aside, with a project such a YaCy, I think their final point that P2P software can replace SaaS (such as search engines) is coming to fruition.
> The same argument would imply that you shouldn't use the email or shell account from your university
Again, I don't think they're arguing this. They'd certainly want you to use a free client, but the email protocol can't really support running servers on a user's machine if it's ever going to be turned off.
Personally, I think the solution for SaaSS operators is to license their code as free software, preferably Affero GPL so that others can't make it non-free. This still introduces privacy concerns but remedies all the lock-in issues and gives users the option of running that software themselves.
To your point on self-hosting being insecure, I think it's still more secure than putting 100% faith in a 3rd party, and one that's a single point of failure (or surveillance). In the end it's not much different of a problem than updating your personal OS.
Is it really? You can get a Pentium III era server essentially for free. Suppose it uses 60 watts (0.06KW). At the national average 12.2c/KWh that's 0.732c/hour. An Amazon micro instance is 1.3c/hour. That's the "I only need one instance" rate; if you need more than one then you can get slightly newer hardware with virtualization support which makes self-hosting even more attractive.
> And even if you do end up self-hosting everything, chances are you won't be responding to security issues as quickly as a full-time team of professionals on call.
Amazon doesn't maintain your VM. When your VM is vulnerable to Heartbleed or Shellshock you still have to patch it yourself unless you've configured auto updates, which applies the same to self-hosting.
What Amazon provides is convenience. If you need about a hundred cores for twelve hours, you can buy a dozen 8-core machines on eBay, use them for twelve hours and then sell them again for about what you paid for them, but that's a huge pain compared with configuring the equivalent on EC2. EC2 isn't necessarily cheaper, it's just a lot easier, especially if you don't already have the requisite experience and don't want to learn. Which is much the same as it has always been with free vs. proprietary software.
You pay Amazon to host your VMs because it's easier, not because you're saving money. There are only a small number of use cases (like having a highly inconsistent/unpredictable load from day to day) where paying someone to host for you will actually save you money.
There are many kinds of freedom.
If I'm spending hours or days trying to get some inadequate free program to accomplish some task I need, or trying to work around the lack of a free program in that area at all, when there is a proprietary program that will quickly accomplish my task, NOT using the proprietary program takes away freedom. It enslaves me to spending hours on that task when I could be doing something I would enjoy more.
If it is a task that will be ongoing as opposed to a one shot, and so I might have some concern about getting locked into something, freedom maximizing would probably involve a mixed approach: use the proprietary tool, and toss in some monetary support toward some free software project working in that area.
The "freedom to get things done quickly" is a shallow freedom that leads users into a life of helpless servitude and social division. The reason this happens is because there are many people who write proprietary software which will help users do powerful things but the software will also have various restrictions that result in helpless servitude and social division. Stallman teaches that users who choose to accept these proprietary software with the restrictions cannot live in freedom as users are forbidden to control the proprietary software, the control over the software belongs to the owner of the proprietary software.
I actually agreed with the article up to that point, but this is wheasel-wording and kinda dishonest. Microsoft's backdoor is universal as it has access to your entire system. The described SaaSS backdoor isn't universal - it only pertains to that particular service and no other services (or non-services) can be affected. Thus, given the previous definition of the word, it is not "universal"
This wheasel-wording only detracts from the point being made and may alienate people who would normally agree.
Let's look at Google...
Android - Get people to use Google products on mobile. Adsense - Add ads to your site. Analytics - Track how users use stuff to provide better ads. Gmail - Track your email to serve you better ads. Google Search - Serve you ads.
Sure they have Dart, Angular, etc which they developed for use internally and then released to the public. But do you honestly think that has anything to do with their business model? They hired smart people, and smart people design things. Those people then released them as open source. But do you honestly believe if Google was to start (theoretically) having money issues, those products would not be the first to go?
Try to find Goog's SERP ranking algorithm on GitHub. Or their Adwords scoring/pricing code. What about Google Doc's text editor? Also, most Google apps on Android are closed.
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Controversy-surrounds...
Why should they? It would be nice if they did but they'd be directly enabling their competition. That's not what open source is all about as far as I understand it.
It's a case of "Everything I do is valuable, but everything you do should be free."
Please explain why you believe this is true.
Also, don't confuse open source software and free software, there's actually a not-so-subtle difference.
Maybe because when you give people the right to freely copy, use and redistribute your code it's a bit hard to then ask them to pay for it.
Some ways to milk $ out of free software include:
- Being the de-facto expert in your product (hello sweet 6-7 figure consulting contracts when an Enterprise picks it up)
- Training
- Tech support (hand-holding)
- Publish books about the subject
The list goes on. If enough people adopt a free software project, that doesn't preclude the person (or persons) who release it from turning a profit. It just ensures they can't do so at the expense of the liberty of their users.
Book publishing can sometimes be alternative, but what if your code is so intuitive and easy to understand that no one needs a book about it? Or what if you're a bad communicator and someone else writes a much better book?
For some things this may work, but if someone's going to be investing 6-7 figure consulting contracts, and the code is open and free, they'll eventually replace you with someone else in-house.
* Training
Isn't a recurring or ongoing stream.
* Tech support
If you design your product/service well enough, people probably won't need much hand-holding. Or... someone else will take the code and make a better version that doesn't need the hand-holding, and win your potential customers away.
* Books
Again... not really recurring.
Yes, there's ways to make money, but none of these are terribly good business models. Books? Entire massive companies based around books are folding or shrinking. Suggesting that someone's business model be based on books is... weird.
And when the code is open, you'll face more potential competition than if the code was closed.
ACK - I missed your 'milk' phrase. 'Milking money' just doesn't scream 'solid business model' - it screams out "petty vendor who will nickel and dime me to death".
Yeah, that's why you don't put all your eggs in the same basket :)
> ACK - I missed your 'milk' phrase. 'Milking money' just doesn't scream 'solid business model' - it screams out "petty vendor who will nickel and dime me to death".
I view business as inherently evil and selfish. I am choosing to engage in business because I don't care about being good.
I suggest rebuilding your frame of reference.
Offering something of value for a profit is not evil. It may be considered selfish, but it is also selfish to offer something of value for free to gain moral high ground, peer recognition, and resume fodder.
Being selfish isn't evil; survival isn't evil. You live in a community that has rules and values, and if you live in the spirit of those rules and values, being selfish isn't causing harm, and in most cases, helps others. When a business bends those rules, or breaks them with no regard for the community, that can be considered unethical and in some cases "immoral" and possibly evil by some definitions.
If your business model doesn't take advantage of customers, employees, or the surrounding community, you probably have a good business plan.
Thanks, but I'm perfectly happy with my opinions and will not be discarding them at the behest of some HN user.
No need to be condescending. I've actually been researching this a fair bit lately for a new project.
What I found was that even though people parrot the revenue models you list above, the reality is that it is far more risky to go open than to "control the supply".
The margins on services (consulting, training, support etc..) are much lower than selling the code.
Here is one example I came across showing how it's no slam-dunk: http://www.locomotivecms.com/articles/we-tried-to-solve-the-...
I disagree because this is HN
Please re-read the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.
I would be surprised to find anybody doing serious development without relying on open source software somewhere.
And the companies I've worked for have generally been very willing to release code as open source, partly for goodwill and advertising (we've received several job applicants who only learned about us through our contributions to open source projects), and partly to avoid the cost of maintaining an internal fork of, say, Boost or JQuery. Even if you can't open source the whole kaboodle, it's often possible to release something, especially additions to existing open source projects.
I wasn't trying to tell people how to be Stallman's friends, or how to get absolution (for whatever wrongs) by following the FSF's advice. Instead, I want to encourage people to pick their battles. If you can't get permission to release your full program as open source (or, if you plan to become rich and don't see any way to do so after you've published your source code), then perhaps whoever is responsible for the decision would be willing to release less than everything today.
free software to me does not mean free for all. a person and an organization can still keep its secrets. (corrections welcome)
So, in your hypothetical, it turns out to be very hard to prevent the distribution of the source, unless all the POS units are held in-house (that you are a company developing and using your own POS units in commerce, as opposed to being a POS vendor) and that all your employees who have standing to receive a copy of the source have some compelling reason to not distribute it.
That's a feature to GPL advocates and a bug to GPL detractors.
You also forgot to mention the culture behind many Foss projects: profit is seen as evil and your project will get forked, the second you try to turn a profit.
Foss users expect free support, bug fixing, and software. Part of the entitled generation of internet users.
If you want to make a living, proprietary services all the way.
Yes, that's the point of free software. Everyone can.
> Competition is fierce and training and tech support aren't scalable for a small shop.
I think you're underestimating the degree to which most of the world outside of IT (and including much of the world inside IT) is too lazy to figure it out and would rather pay money for a black box that solves their problems.
> Foss users expect free support, bug fixing, and software. Part of the entitled generation of internet users.
Not all of us do. And if your audience is companies, not users, the goals align differently.
So by open sourcing my product, I am opening myself up to all sorts of competition. Not a very smart way to run a business.
"I think you're underestimating the degree to which most of the world outside of IT (and including much of the world inside IT) is too lazy to figure it out and would rather pay money for a black box that solves their problems."
You're right. But if anyone can do it (mentioned above), it will eventually be a race to the bottom (based on cost) when software is equal.
"Not all of us do. And if your audience is companies, not users, the goals align differently."
I run a business. I wouldn't hire a 1 or 2 person shop for support of an open source project. I have had way too many bad experiences.
When you are just starting out, it's hard enough to make money. Why make it even more difficult by increasing competition and doing something that will not scale well?
I saw this in one of your other posts:
"I view business as inherently evil and selfish. I am choosing to engage in business because I don't care about being good."
I wish you would have said this in the first place. I would have not wasted the time responding to you.
If the product is created easy to use, there is no reason to buy a book, to require technical support, or require training.
Consider an open source photo sharing application. You distribute a system so easy that anyone can set it up. You hire people to do user studies to make the (AGPL) web application just work.
The more money you spend making it easy to set up and use, the less money you are able to collect for training, tech support, and books.
You cannot sell opensource software itself directly because it's free. What you can sell is: 1. 24/7 support 2. Enterprise/proprietary features 3. Consulting/custom development based on your product
Problem is, in this business model (called "enterprise opensource software"), you're not getting paid for writing the core software product itself. Your clients expect you (or somebody) to just do that for free. A more nuanced problem is that those 3 types of revenues only scale linearly: if you want to support 2x as many customers, you will have to hire 2x as many support engineers. Your profit margin will not increase as you add customers.
Towards the end of my startup I had a shocking insight. Given the above revenue channels, I should have just tried to be the n+1th Hadoop vendor and screw my own product. That way _I_ don't have to invest my time to work on the core product, which doesn't get me revenue anyway. I can just concentrate on the revenue generating stuff. And Hadoop was already an established opensource project anyway.
In the end I didn't do that, because I wanted to have a product company, not a support/consulting/custom development company. And there was already Cloudera et al. The company failed.
More generally, there's no good incentive to develop a new opensource product if you want to make money off it. If you try to, you will spend a good deal of your time writing the core product for free, taking on the huge risk of first trying to make it a successful opensource project (not business). Then, if and when it becomes a successful opensource project (a big if), you will split your resources between working on the core product "for free", and the 3 channels above, which will actually make you money.
I'm not saying you can't make money. You can, but it's not fun, and it's not working on the core product. If you also try to write the core product itself (like MongoDB), you're taking on a huge, time-consuming initial risk, unlike in SaaS where you can be lean, learn and iterate with 100 customers.
I think SaaS is a great business model, much better than software products. It's good for opensource, too: SaaS companies opensource tons of software. For example, I work at Prezi now, and we opensource lots that isn't the core presentation product itself:
Sorry to hear you didn't make it, but your work will live on now, probably forever or as a part of some other offering, it may be small consolation to you but to me it proves the system worked.
> Imagine if your company had not been an open source company but rather a closed source company. Instead of being able to bootstrap you'd have to start with getting a large bunch of money on an idea that already has an open source equivalent.
Why does starting with the stronger revenue model mean you need to start with getting a large bunch of money rather than bootstrapping? AFAIK software with a revenue-generating license costs the same to develop as free software.
> Sorry to hear you didn't make it, but your work will live on now, probably forever or as a part of some other offering, it may be small consolation to you but to me it proves the system worked.
Why would anyone want to participate in a system whose goals prioritize strangers getting gratis database software over our families being able to eat? I'm all for generosity, but I'm also for looking after yourself and your dependents.
Because enterprise sales are hard. Open source can get in through the back door, but closed source has to beat a path through the front door and that costs money, lots of it.
> Why would anyone want to participate in a system whose goals prioritize strangers getting gratis database software over our families being able to eat?
It's not about your families being able to eat or not. You can find plenty of middle ground, or you can decide to contribute to open source just to scratch your itch or fix your bug. That's why it works well for some kinds of software but not for all kinds of software. It works well for:
- best of breed infrastructure projects (runners up have the same issues they have in commerce)
- libraries
- frameworks
It does not work well for things where bespoke software is the norm or where the customer wants to have their own IP. For those situations traditional closed source software works better. That's why you're going to have a hard time finding a quality CAD/CAM system using open source that is tightly integrated and polished.
There are middle grounds: Blender famously used the ransom model to become open source, entire empires have been built on service companies around open source and some people made pretty good money selling their open source projects to the highest bidder (glusterfs, mysql and a whole raft of others).
So nobody is forcing you to give your work to others so your families can't eat, it's a free choice. I decided very specifically not to contribute to open source because I wanted my family to eat, though I do file the occasional bug report/patch (and the way in which those are treated is not very encouraging to do more of it). But at the same time I'm grateful for everybody that did contribute to open source, they enabled the web as we know it to a very large extent and to discard or devalue that is a huge mistake.
The work lives on as a github repo that nobody cares about. I'm not upset about it today, I learned a lot, but that's how it is.
Btw. it's:
I have a long list of 'failures' behind me, not a single one I would care to repeat but also not a single one that didn't teach me something, I always cherish the thought that the failures eventually led to the opportunities that worked out and that without them those wouldn't have happened either. For the same money you would have had the next mongodb.
That was a pretty crowded space at the time.
I don't think Stallman has tenure (or any position) at MIT. Wikipedia says simply: "In February 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983."
The Takeda foundation award was about $250K: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2001-12/msg00002....
The MacArthur fellowship was awarded in 1990, about 6 years after Stallman decided to work full time as a free software activist. I don't think it's fair to claim that he would behave any differently without these awards.
I think this is a necessary trade-off. Great business models often lead to monopoly and stagnation.
This makes him a revolutionary. Unfortunately, when the mainstream absorbs the revolution, what does the revolutionary do? Basically try to get them to adopt the ideas that aren't very good because all the good ones have been taken.
The best thing we could do is just say he was a great contributor to software, and ignore whatever drivel he writes now, much like we do with ESR.
I seem to remember he supported Hugo Chávez.
This is a strawman argument as Stallman does not advocate this at all. Stallman encourages for programmers to get paid for programming work and to sell software at any price that the customer will burden. Stallman is happy for everybody to do business and profit when the business does not hurt people. In the business model of selling proprietary software and selling SAAS, users are harmed of four specific freedoms of free software so Stallman will condemn any business (or any other non-business organization) that does this.
I don't think that RMS cares about business models: he argues that proprietary software is unethical, not that it's bad business.
One could probably make a decent sum of money as a hit man, but it would be unethical.
Open source advocates argue pragmatically that open source software can be better (many eyes make all bugs shallow) or that it can be a competitive advantage to comnmoditise one's complements; free software advocates don't necessarily disagree, but don't particular care: they believe that proprietary software is fundamentally wrong.
You may dislike it, but do you disagree? Can you refute the plethora of ethical arguments RMS has been making over the last several decades?
I still agree with his point. Is it even worth pointing out such trivial things that might well end up hijacking the top thread here? Richard's message, in its entirety, makes an important point. Let's rather discuss that.
Microsoft's "universal backdoor" is Windows Update I'm pretty sure. And our telemetry is the spyware. And yes, you could likely attempt to alter a copy of Adobe Reader through Windows Update, but so could any installer under the sun. It's a weak, inflammatory argument to call updates a backdoor. Indeed, the argument against updates will boil down to "well it's not free so how do you know it's not doing x". Which becomes the argument that all nonfree software is/can be backdoored.
Its not a weak and inflammatory argument to call Windows Update a backdoor. If push comes to shove and its very profitable for MS (or they're threatened by the NSA, or any other "really good" reason), they can and very likely will automatically install something on your system that you don't want. Or replace the default search engine with Bing. Or uninstall something. Or make your machine unusable.
We've already seen mild examples of this (see U2's album)
SaaS (especially web-based) doesn't have that kind of power over your machine (or over other services you use)
Microsoft Windows doesn't have a backdoor to data on your android phone, but its backdoor is still universal within the scope of your your Windows installation'. Do you have a more appropriate term he could've used? I'm not familiar with one offhand, if you know one I'd appreciate you sharing it.
That might be a good thing to fix, actually...
I myself struggle with the question of how I can put something out into the world such that it is freely available to theoretically anyone while also finding a way to pay my own bills. Writing code is not a big part of what I want to do. It is, in fact, probably a fairly small part of what I want to do. But it is a similar problem space. And few other people are writing anything that elucidates for me the details of why this stuff matters, how it matters, what the exact consequences are and so on. I find that very helpful in thinking through my own problem space.
So I will just briefly thank him here (not that I expect him to read this). I read a biography about him some months ago and that was a real step forward for me in my thinking through some of my own challenges. Thank you, Mr. Stallman.
http://bootstrapped.fm/bootstrapped-episode-35-hate-the-saas...
Making that decision in an informed way starts with having some idea of what you're giving up.
In the case of SaaSS, you're often not sure what you're giving up precisely because the operation of the server is so opaque to you. E.g. is the server copying all your email to a hostile foreign government? The operator /says/ it isn't.
Indeed, it can be a bit abstract-- but many other important tradeoffs we weigh also involve abstract implications or effects at a distance.
The fact is that many people today are incapable of even installing an application on a proprietary desktop OS, much less utilizing the freedom of software they control. 10 years ago I was building websites for people at $1000-$5000 a pop, all with open source software. They have all the benefits of free software available to them, but you know what they don't have? Anyone to maintain their software for a reasonable price. I've been directing them to SaaS providers for a long time because frankly it makes no sense to pay me 100 times as much to a software professional in order to realize this freedom.
Obviously Stallman would say that there's no inherent reason that you can't have a reasonably priced service based on free software, just like there's no reason you can't charge for shrinkwrapped free software. However the mechanics and cost savings of SaaS make this much much more difficult to conceive, and frankly I don't see how it will ever make sense for the laymen who make up the vast vast majority of computer users today.
Stallman is a gem of the computing world, and I would never say anything bad about his ideology, but the primary battle that needs to be fought today is about data ownership, not software freedom. The latter still matters, but only for the computing elites (ie. programmers, sysadmins, etc), the former is what is increasingly going to affect everyone going forward.
Arguing that paying someone to run the software for you is unethical is like arguing that paying for a well-prepared meal in a restaurant is unethical. You should source all the ingredients and prepare them in your own kitchen.
Except we're paying for the expertise of the chef. In the case of SaaS we're paying for not maintaining our own data center, system administration costs, operations costs, monitoring and security.
But the chef might not use clean food! People will get sick, the chef's reputation will suffer, and he'll go out of business.
As you say, the question is data ownership. Turning that toward the analogy, how do we verify data security such that reputation is affected? Make ethical behavior valuable (reputation) and businesses will behave ethically.
In a restaurant, there is no unjust power over the customer. In a restaurant, a customer can order some dishes and order the dishes to be prepared a particular way. When the customer gets the meal, the customer is free to do things such as add more things to the food, take the food away for later eating or share the food with friends or even resell the food to anybody. In the case of SAAS, similar freedoms are not available to the user. Users are forbidden to study and modify how the service operates, and users are forbidden to share the computing service with other people. Control over the service belongs to the SAAS company and not the user.
I would submit that a SaaS provider could not ethically allow modifications to their running software. So let's exclude that from the discussion.
What if a provider only ran software licensed with the AGPL? It wouldn't fix anything. The license requires accessing a download of the source. How can a customer verify the version of the software is the same as the version of the download, i.e. check for a violation of the license? Short of having access to the operating system on the servers, the customer cannot. No reasonable service provider would allow such access, and no reasonable customer would accept that other customers, including, possibly, competitors, had such access.
You can push the problem around all you like (every customer has their own server with OS-level access, but what about the DB?). It will always end up being cost prohibitive to run a service.
Also, under the AGPL the point is for any user of the system to be able to host and run their own instance. Meaning that any innovations must be given away. Conversely, if the software can only run in the context of the provider's data store, the problem of data ownership is not resolved.
Do I want the keys to the OS on my home computer. Darn right. At work, do I want the keys to Amazon's virtualization layer? Heck no, I don't want those headaches. It's what I'm paying them for.
Stallman's position also fails to address the ethics of contract law. What makes Free Software ethics superior to ethics of contracts?
Anyway, to be clear: Stallman actually says that breaking your promise, i.e. breaking a contract is not cool, so you shouldn't ever accept a contract that requires you to give up essential freedoms. He does not advocate breaking contracts, he argues about which contract terms are ethical or unethical. He doesn't say break the unethical ones, he says don't accept them in the first place.
And you could run hosted software that does something that involves networking fundamentally, such as a chat service, and it would not be SaaSS. And you could run any software under a permissive license and still provide the code as though it were AGPL. AGPL isn't a requirement for being ethical, it just helps stop people from being unethical (but they could choose to be ethical regardless).
I don't think he is: The challenge for excellent free software today is to build software which can be used maintenance free (and, of course, be compatible with maintenance if the user wants to provide some).
Of course, it's _easer_ to build software that runs remotely and can be fixed silently for the user at any time, than software which has to be complete and correct when it goes out the door...
Freedom that costs to much can't deliver on its promise. The response shouldn't be to abandon improved freedom as a goal, but to apply our intellect to lowering the cost.
Of course you are right that we should rise to the challenge of shipping excellent free software, but experience tells me that it doesn't matter how good we get at this, we will still be undone by the transient nature of software stacks. Patches will be necessary unless people never upgrade, which of course they will because sooner or later they will desire new features or it's necessitated by security. At best we can asymptotically approach the amortized cost of having someone else manage your software for you, and even that is dreamland until free OSes finds a way to approach the UX provided by Apple/Microsoft/Google.
You're welcome to devote your life to proving me wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.
A competitive market when you're looking to see that piece of software extended or adapted.
There are a lot of opportunities to trade off short term ease for tail risk, and thats a bit hazardous. RMS would probably argue that while you should have the freedom to do such a thing, you really shouldn't both because of the harms to you not being justified if you don't overemphasize the near term, and also because of systemic effects like losing solidarity with other people who would prefer to make another decision().
[e.g. many people who choose to run their own small mail filters find them regularly invisibly black holded by major mail services due to overactive spamfiltering.]
I don't have to use SaaS to have these results. I've seen in-house efforts with the same risks. The difference, in my mind, is that with SaaS, the provider has some significant incentives to do a good job. The software is their specialty, and the developer will lose money if you stop using it because their software ends up costing you money. There's much less risk of internal company politics saddling you with a useless or dangerous system. On the contrary, I've seen "self-hosted" company projects promised in response to proposals to use SaaS, and they were usually promised to achieve some political goal rather than being a serious attempt to compete. Because it's an internal project which doesn't generate revenue, it's very easy for the company to promise something and then not deliver, as there's no money tied to it.
Having seen this multiple times, I'm much more inclined to use SaaS. Tail risks don't cost nearly as much money over the mid term as the risk of company politics derailing an otherwise laudable goal.
It seems like in most cases the criticism of web services mostly are in loss of privacy and digital security. On the other hand to me the point of the (A)GPL is ensuring that computer users have the right to inspect and modify the software running on their own systems.
I understand that there is some overlap: using free software is likely (I think) to increase one's privacy and digital security.
By taking away the rights of the copyright holders (IE: copying software freely without permission), they were forced to come up with something that can't be copied: software-as-a-service.
I see him as someone who values things differently than I do, but I also could see a future 150 years down the road where people bemoan and wail, "why didn't we listen to Stallman".
And this being hacker news, you have to admire the great hack that is the GPL.
I could also argue that Linux is generally holding the world back. Just like wrong and right...this whole thing is a matter of opinion and point of view. There are simply no absolutes to measure against.
Maybe we didn't see enough bullshit put into proprietary programs? Not enough backdoors? Not enough DRM maybe?
This may be an unpopular opinion but it certainly is a valid one. I tend to side with it.
Or perhaps he's the guy in 1905 trying to get people to keep using electric cars. In 120 years time it might turn out that he was onto something all along.