Thread: Regarding software as a service

There has been a lot of concern regarding software as a service. What do you think?

Software as a service means that in order to do your computing, you are going to send your data to someone
else's computer. There, he is going to run a program and your computing will be done in his computer and with his copy of a program. If the program is someone else's copy then
the person who owns the copy takes away the control from you. Here you don't have control on your computing, so you must not do this. The only way you can have control of your computing is if you do it in your copy of a free program. But the structure of the problem is different.

Interestingly, in case of software as a service, it doesn't matter whether that guy's copy, which you are using, is free software or not, because if it is free software-that means he has control of the copy and not you. We can't say that you, we and everyone has to have control over his copy. Because he is entitled to control his copy. That means, when we do computing we should not use his copy; we should use our copy. That is the only way the user can have control. So, software as a service is simply bad and cannot be redeemed. Nothing can make it acceptable.

However, I want to point out that most servers are not software as a service. Most servers are just doing something and, in most cases, it's not you computing your data on that server. For example, if you visit stallman. arg, you can read what I have published. That is not software as a service. Or if you go to the free software directory at directoryfsjorg, you can search our list of free programs. Well, that runs a program, but that is not software as a service. What you are doing is looking at
our data. So there is no problem. Or suppose you go to a Web-store and buy something; what you are doing there
is e-commerce and that is a mutual transaction between you and someone else.

It is not you computing your data, so that is not software as a service. Suppose you help edit a Wikipedia page-what you are doing there is helping to do Wikipedias computing. And that is not your computing on your data. It is not software as a service and it is fine. So, we should be aware when I condemn software as a service-out of all the web sites in the world software as a serVice is a tiny fraction of them. It is a narrow way of using a server. Most Web servers are something else.