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Ask HN: Where are the open source SaaS applications?

• smoldesu 5y ago
  They're running locally. Stallman has a pretty good essay[0] on this, where he calls out SaaSS (Service As A Software Substitute) because the majority of SaaSes are perfectly capable of being self-hosted, operated peer-to-peer, or locally stored. Obviously that doesn't make money though, so people draft up a price and offer convenient liability to business users (like "Free Lifetime Support for just $999 more a month!"), which leads to the present shitshow that we're living in. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
• abecedarius 5y ago
  https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ seems relevant.
• caymanjim 5y ago
  What exactly do you mean? A huge number of hosted services are basically open source products that you could host yourself if you wanted to. Amazon RDS is just Postgres/MySQL/others; Amazon ElastiCache is just Redis/memcached; etc. That's how almost all of cloud computing works. You can run these yourself too. If this isn't what you mean, please add some clarity in the description.
• kentonv 5y ago
  I wrote about this 7 years ago. The SaaS model defeats most of the purpose of open source: https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-federated-hosting https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-re... We need some easier way to self-host. But my attempt at that (sandstorm.io) didn't find product-market fit.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]