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I've thought this for years: the aggressive defense of super liberal OSS licenses with no sort of "SaaS clause" or other limits turns FOSS into free labor for S

by api 7y ago

I've thought this for years: the aggressive defense of super liberal OSS licenses with no sort of "SaaS clause" or other limits turns FOSS into free labor for SaaS companies. SaaS is more closed than closed: you control nothing, not even your data, and can trivially be spied on and monetized in other questionable ways. The fact that some of the pieces of a SaaS site are open source is meaningless and changes nothing. If all code must be free "as in beer" for all uses then this kind of SaaS (paid or "free" and paid for via surveillance capitalism) is literally the only possible business model. Well that and traditional 100% closed. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are fine with that.

kemitchell 7y ago
> SaaS is more closed than closed Nice turn of phrase. I'd add only that services not only can be more closed than software, it's normal and in some sense acceptable that they are. Whether it's freedom rhetoric or business advice, there's a strange disconnect between received wisdom for software and received wisdom for services.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
closeparen 7y ago
>free labor for SaaS companies Approximately all then open source software I work with on a daily basis is SaaS companies pooling efforts on the problems they have in common, yes.
- api 7y ago
  That's by no means all of open source. Some of us are working on things designed to re-enable a peer to peer personal computing model.
skybrian 7y ago
Just as a side note, "free labor" is common and not necessarily a bad thing. Whenever you give someone a gift, whatever work you did on it is effectively free labor. You could also think of donations to charity that way when you fund them out of your salary, not to mention volunteering. It's true that often people don't want to do that, though, and this is certainly understandable.
- api 7y ago
  I don't want to give free gifts to surveillance capitalist companies.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> SaaS is more closed than closed: you control nothing, not even your data, and can trivially be spied on and monetized in other questionable ways Spot on, and those companies managed to subvert and violate the spirit of FLOSS in many ways.

by api 7y ago

kemitchell 7y ago

> SaaS is more closed than closed Nice turn of phrase. I'd add only that services not only can be more closed than software, it's normal and in some sense acceptable that they are. Whether it's freedom rhetoric or business advice, there's a strange disconnect between received wisdom for software and received wisdom for services.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

closeparen 7y ago

>free labor for SaaS companies Approximately all then open source software I work with on a daily basis is SaaS companies pooling efforts on the problems they have in common, yes.

api 7y ago
That's by no means all of open source. Some of us are working on things designed to re-enable a peer to peer personal computing model.

skybrian 7y ago

Just as a side note, "free labor" is common and not necessarily a bad thing. Whenever you give someone a gift, whatever work you did on it is effectively free labor. You could also think of donations to charity that way when you fund them out of your salary, not to mention volunteering. It's true that often people don't want to do that, though, and this is certainly understandable.

api 7y ago
I don't want to give free gifts to surveillance capitalist companies.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> SaaS is more closed than closed: you control nothing, not even your data, and can trivially be spied on and monetized in other questionable ways Spot on, and those companies managed to subvert and violate the spirit of FLOSS in many ways.