
Who does that server really serve? (2010) - cnst
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html
======
nexuist
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.

~~~
esotericn
> 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.

~~~
nexuist
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.

~~~
esotericn
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.

~~~
nexuist
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.

~~~
esotericn
> 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.

~~~
nexuist
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.

~~~
esotericn
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.

------
jammygit
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?

------
movedx
> 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

~~~
jolmg
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.

------
NotASithLord
"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?

------
supakeen
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.

------
lonelappde
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.

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

~~~
tjr
From the bottom of the page:

 _Copyright © 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 Richard Stallman_

 _Updated: $Date: 2018 /12/15 14:02:39 $_

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

~~~
hinkley
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.

