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Today's SaaS world is largely economically opposed to the idea of data ownership. It's a lot easier to make money by renting people access to their data. The
by TAForObvReasons 7y ago
Today's SaaS world is largely economically opposed to the idea of data ownership. It's a lot easier to make money by renting people access to their data.
The problem is not inherently technical. The solution must address the fact that the software businesses favor cloud solutions and other systems that make it difficult to stop spending money
- quickthrower2 7y agoYes. I always think data freedom is more important than software freedom. For example it matters less that MS Word is not free as in freedom when you can open the file in something that is.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAnd cloud SaaS are enemies of both! After all, in order to have data freedom, you need to have something to open in that other program, and cloud solutions do their best to not give you proper open/save file (and even if there's an export function, and even if everything is actually included in the export, it often isn't followed by import function that could read that export). For this reason, I avoid using cloud SaaS for anything where can avoid it.
- quickthrower2 7y agoAbsolutely. There are some exceptions though. Github is the obvious one. Dropbox by nature has your data constantly exported. Google for its sins has Google takeout.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoYes. And the first two I use, treating them mostly as dumb pieces of infrastructure. Arguably, the functionality they provide have a crucial ops component that I'm all for paying for someone else to handle it for me. But neither Github nor Dropbox locks me into anything. Google - yes, web e-mail obviously is similar to the above; as for their office suite, I recently found a good excuse to justify shelling out for a proper Microsoft Office subscription (though I don't like that it's a subscription), and I stick to using the faster, locally-available, file-using, much more powerful (if still proprietary) software.
- SanchoPanda 7y agoSeperating the two so cleanly is inappropriate imho. Software is the access layer around data, hence "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month (1975) I would even say that software freedom implies or even requires data freedom, while the reverse does not hold. As an example I don't think that Facebook or Google's data export tools make them exemplars of user choice or control.
- jariel 7y agoYes, this is it. We went from local, to local infrastructure/IT, to cloud services in which data is mixed with other data and ownership is nebulous. The business as you say, favours this, because the 'downsides' of the model are more on the side of risk (your data leaking, losing rights to your data, your data being 'sold' etc.) - which we don't like to pay for until it's too late. Unless there are 'big scares' or regulatory requirements etc. I don't see that much changing. But a single major leak from Salesforce or say Google Docs could see a massive shift in how we think about such things.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIf Equifax or even Ashley Madison leaks didn't cause any shift in the software culture, I'm having doubts a breach of Salesforce or G Suite would.