5 ms·

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

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.

99052882514569 7y ago
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.
shantly 7y ago
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".
esotericn 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> 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.
- tathougies 7y ago
  > 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.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    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.
    - ppress 7y ago
      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.
paulddraper 7y ago
> 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.
- nexuist 7y ago
  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!
  - esotericn 7y ago
    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.
    - nexuist 7y ago
      >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.
flukus 7y ago
> 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.

99052882514569 7y ago

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.

shantly 7y ago

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".

esotericn 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> 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.

tathougies 7y ago
> 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.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  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.
  - ppress 7y ago
    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.

paulddraper 7y ago

> 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.

nexuist 7y ago
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!
- esotericn 7y ago
  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.
  - nexuist 7y ago
    >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.

flukus 7y ago

> 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.