> Also, as is typical for things linked from HN, this whole article seems very web-y and SaaS-y. There are other kinds of open source projects, believe it or not.
Your browser. Your OS. Your video editor. Your DAW. Most embedded systems found around your home and workplace and transportation. Air traffic control. Scientific data analysis. Most video/computer games.
I'll grant you those, though I've been hearing noise about DAWs starting to move to the browser. And, of course, you omitted image editing, which at this point is almost completely taken over by a small number of SaaS offerings (Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, Canva).
> Your OS.
I'd wish. At this point Microsoft is, both explicitly and unironically, saying that Windows "is a Service". I literally saw that on a Win10 installer screen the other day.
> Most embedded systems found around your home and workplace and transportation.
Much good it does me if the control plane goes through a cloud server. See my other comment in this subthread.
> Air traffic control.
Hopefully, maybe, but I'm no longer certain of it. Web SaaS apps have been popping up in ground and maritime transportation for a while now, so aviation may be already affected too.
> Scientific data analysis.
That's cloud-dependent these days.
> Most video/computer games.
Most high-end video games are SaaS now. Even in single-player mode, as again, the vendor's servers are on the control path, and the game won't boot without at least acquiring a license from a server and checking for updates.
Just because it doesn't run in a browser, doesn't mean it's not SaaS.
SaaS does not mean "the software opens a socket and communicates with a server for brief portions of its runtime". It does not mean "cloud-based". It does not mean whatever Microsoft wants it to mean.
SaaS means that a substantial portion of the compute task associated with "an application" can only be completed via a server request (whether it's to initiate the compute task, or fetch the code that will run it, or some combination of the two).
> SaaS means that a substantial portion of the compute task associated with "an application" can only be completed via a server request (whether it's to initiate the compute task, or fetch the code that will run it, or some combination of the two).
Does "ask for permission to run local code" count? Then modern video games, and quite a lot of other software, count. Per your "initiate the compute task", my robot vacuum is fully SaaS.
> It does not mean whatever Microsoft wants it to mean.
What Microsoft means fits your definition, they're just taking a soft approach - Windows now constantly fetches new code from the cloud, they're just not forcing it to be a required dependency, should you want to turn this behavior off.
Also remember I called out software being implicitly SaaS, not explicitly.
Related: forcing people away from Windows 7. Half a year ago, my wife was forced to upgrade her perfectly fine Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10, which she actively hates, because suddenly, third-party software like Spotify begun refusing to work, showing instead messages to the tune of "upgrade to newer Windows or GTFO". Yes, it's not Microsoft doing this per se, but the effect is the same. Implicit SaaS is a software ecosystem problem.
Everything. Like e.g. my robot vacuum that I couldn't operate between 1600 yesterday and noon today, because the Internet was down and the robot insists on being able to talk with servers in China to be able to vacuum the floor. Same with my A/C and floor thermostats, except those at least have IR remotes or wall panels for local control.
Of course, I am operating all those via an Open Source HomeAssistant app, connecting to an Open Source HomeAssistant instance running on an Open(ish) Hardware Raspberry Pi. But all of that means fuck all, when the malicious vendors make a cloud server a required control intermediary. Despite all that Open Source, my home appliances are still run as a Service. That's one of many cases of what I mean by "being implicitly a SaaS".
Worst thing is, you have little choice. In my case:
- There's approximately zero non-SaaS robot vacuums among the newer models. I gave up on this after a long search for something free of this insanity.
- With my A/C unit and thermostats, the brand and model choice was made by the people doing the installations. I'm not sure if there are non-cloud, network-controllable options anymore, and even if they were, I'd have to look for local HVAC companies that actually offer them.
- I spent much more time and money than is reasonable to have a fully-local networked baby cam, that doesn't leak videos to the cloud. Specifically, I had to buy a camera and two pieces of expensive network gear from Ubiquity (per HN advice, thank you), because that's apparently the only option in Europe (US folks have Amcrest), other than hacking something together from a spare Android phone, or webcams and Raspberry Pi. There's literally no other cloud-bullshit-free option I could find.
(The "baby cam" is at least made of professional, high-quality gear, so that's a silver lining, but I doubt normal people would be happy to spend €500+ just to keep the video stream in-house.)
You mean the rest of computing...