Ask HN: Is SaaS DRM?

I remember as a teen being terrified for a while about getting into software, despite my inclination towards it, because I believed the idea of free and open source software meant that, eventually, there would be no long term advantage to working in this industry. If everyone can install and run your program locally, why would anyone pay you for it? On the other hand, if you didn't make your program open source, how do you get around the problem of people cracking and distributing it for free? Many years later I've finally started to enter the software industry after all. About a week ago the thought "SaaS is just DRM done right" floated through my brain, and the more I think about it, the more true it feels. Code running on someone else's secured server, with someone else's data and APIs and integrations, and requiring modern authentication-authorization loops, just feels miles harder to crack compared to some Proprietary.exe asking for a license key. The analogy is very loose but it feels accurate in an economic sense to me. What do you think?