

Richard Stallman on SaaS - wslh
http://autonomo.us/2010/03/richard-stallman-on-saas/

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phamilton
I'll call it first: BS.

Having worked in High Performance Computing, I can say that there is nothing
worse than a heterogenous workload. If you've got image processing, data
mining, number crunching, and simulations all running on the same hardware and
OS, you miss out on a lot of optimization. If you are only doing one of those,
then you can get quite a bit more performance out of the hardware by tuning it
properly. SaaS, by it's specialized nature, allows that tuning to take place.
Running everything on your own machines just slows them all down.

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aksbhat
While I wouldn't go as far to call it BS. I agree with your argument.

I believe we need better laws that will ensure the freedom rather than
modifying the system. In all other aspects of human life, we have relied on
legal system to achieve economies of scale, while preserving our freedom. We
dont grow our own food, or manufacture our own drugs, rather we rely on
oversight of FDA etc. Sure the system isn't perfect but still its better than
having a farm in your backyard and a chemical plant in your basement.

We need a legal revolution to address issues posed by rapidly evolving
technology.

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_phred
a.) Yes, there are some privacy and ownership/property problems that
legislation could possibly solve, but… b.) more laws makes it harder and less
fun to write, distribute, and profit from making software.

However, I do think that a legal recourse for users to be able to export all
of their data from a service in some format makes sense, especially when said
data are entrusted to software startups that have a proclivity for being
bought, sold, and swiftly unsupported or end-of-life'd at the drop of a hat.

Or, simpler, and less encumbering: how about a developer-initiated consortium
of companies who "won't screw you over" when it comes time to back-up or find
a new home for your data? Something like a Better (Software) Business Bureau
who promises not to leave you high and dry… but now I'm just having
excessively utopian thoughts.

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thaumaturgy
I don't think the practical risk here justifies any such thing, because all of
this is occurring in a market with possibly one of the lowest barriers-to-
entry of any market in human history. With the ubiquity of screen scrapers,
the power of various programming languages and environments, and the
interconnectedness of the web, any attempt to jail your data can usually be
met, quickly, by a large number of people.

For example: back when Facebook was really irritating everyone, Diaspora came
along. Now, Diaspora should probably be considered a failed project at this
point, but along the way there was a not-small number of developers that came
forward and said, "hey, I already did this, start with my code...", and if the
anger over Facebook hadn't subsided, I have no doubt that at least one of
those projects would have become successful.

Or, for another example: when word got leaked that Yahoo was going to "sunset"
Delicious, it took me all of a few bucks and a couple of clicks to export
every last one of my bookmarks to Pinboard. (Thanks Pinboard!)

Proprietary software, by contrast, carried much greater risk, because it often
used secret data formats which were extremely difficult (or impossible) to
reverse-engineer, and because it was much more difficult to scrape the data
from the screen in a reliable way. I have direct experience with this: small
grocery stores tend to use a product called NCR ScanMaster, which at least
semi-recently was "powered" by a truly atrocious Btrieve database backend,
which was unreadable without the schema files, which nobody would give you
without lots of money. It was damned hard to reverse-engineer too; I have a
proud history of that kind of thing, and it totally stumped me for all but the
simplest of data extractions.

One of my clients needed to be able to make special sale-related changes to
large numbers of products on a regular basis without paying someone to sit
there and key it in all day (and make mistakes while they were at it). We
eventually came up with using AutoHotKey to control the screen and data
fields, but even that was rather challenging because of ScanMaster's variable
time delays between screens and AutoHotKey's limitations.

Contrast that with _anything_ web-related, where I could use PHP or Javascript
& Greasemonkey or one of any of a number of solutions to parse and scrape the
content of any site within a matter of hours.

I can't read the article right now -- the site is down -- but the thing about
Stallman is that he's a radical, and he will see his epic foe everywhere he
looks. Cloud computing and SaaS have become popular, and are replacing many
aspects of traditional desktop computing, but if he's making the claim that
there is just as much danger, in terms of personal freedom, with cloud
computing and SaaS as there was with proprietary desktop software or
timesharing systems, well, he's just plain wrong.

He's also, in this context, probably completely irrelevant. I suspect that his
opinions of cloud computing or SaaS will have epsilon impact on the industry,
no matter how loudly or oft-stated.

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mattdeboard
Every day Stallman seems a little less unreasonable to me.

 _One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that
you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own
computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program.
If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're
defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software._

In the shadow of Facebook, who would disagree with this?

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rimantas
I am just not obsessed with total control. There are things I care about, and
there are things I don't.

    
    
      If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web
      server, you're defenceless
    

Uh, oh. I am there for convenience, not to fight.

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mmcconnell1618
Stallman's argument assumes there is an equivalent non-SaaS version of every
service or that you should live without it if you can't get it as open source.
I am giving up absolute control to use Google's search engine but it is not
practical to build my own system to index the entire web with sub-second
response times. If there was a distributed open source search engine project
where a large number of people could pool resources to recreate something
similar to Google that would be a different story.

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clistctrl
my god, you may have inadvertently had a great idea. There's a lot of cool
things that could open up. For instance, i believe right now it is not kosher
to scrape google results. However an open source distributed engine would be
totally kosher.

Search results could potentially be more relevant... there would be millions
of computers instead of hundreds of thousands. people could play with ranking
algorithms... this is a cool thought.

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mmcconnell1618
I thought it was a cool idea too. Lack of control means manipulation of
rankings might be a problem to solve. You would need to ensure that spammers
couldn't flood the system with fake information.

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clistctrl
Maybe its possible to use that to the networks advantage? If manipulating the
data means you need to provide additional computation power/storage... maybe
its possible to find a balance?

~~~
mmcconnell1618
I would be interesting to use multiple random parties to check each other. For
example, have 3 independent nodes index the same site and verify that no one
has tampered with the data.

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ataggart
The link is dead for me, but googling what others quoted yields this Guardian
article from 2008:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.compu...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman)

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postfuturist
Markets for targeted SaaS solutions exists. Nobody is going to develop these
for free and the businesses who need them are more than willing to pay (the
value gained is much, much higher than the subscription fee). There are enough
different businesses with the same need, that economically combined (through
fees) they can support a team that develops the necessary software. These
businesses are not going to collaborate with their competitors to develop the
same software in a million years, but through SaaS providers, they basically
do. Most of the people I know who work in software are basically involved in
this at some level. It's not going away, and in many cases, it is really the
only reasonable model.

