The shuttering of Reader and Gmail's new and awful Compose have convinced me - more than years of Stallman rants and NSA snooping - that relying on closed-sourc

The shuttering of Reader and Gmail's new and awful Compose have convinced me - more than years of Stallman rants and NSA snooping - that relying on closed-source SaaS is a terrible idea. It is a question of if, not when, your SaaS provider does something you intensely dislike, and which you have no power to change. With SaaS, you don't even have the power to say - Damn your improved version, blast your hip new design, I will stick with the old one, thankyouverymuch. You are always on Version Now. The more intertwined your relationship and dependence on integration with related products, the messier the ensuing divorce. This, to my mind, represents a far more inevitable reason to figure a way out of GMail.