The flaw of Software as a Service [LWN.net]

The flaw of Software as a Service

Posted Aug 30, 2007 2:46 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: The flaw of Software as a Service by pizza
Parent article: Ruminations on software freedom

It's a difference of perspective.

Microsoft's software does not allow you the freedom to host your own version of this critical service. Free Software does.

It's probably the same thing that happened to Skype. It's software does not allow you to host your own version of whatever-skype's-servers-do-for-you on your own systems. If it was Free Software it would.

Depending on how you look at it, the freedom provided by Free Software is what makes Open Source Software work, what allows it to be a better development methodology.

Despite all the friction that you see between the 'Free Software' ra-ra camp and the 'Open Source Software' lets-not-scare-the-squares camp.. without the 'Software Freedom' none of Linux or any of the major products used and developed on Linux would ever work. It simply would of never gotten this far being just a 'shareware OS'.

It would just be a toy for software elitists... like BeOS is.

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The flaw of Software as a Service

Posted Aug 30, 2007 9:33 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

What's worse is that it's not just a single point of failure: it's a *wholly unnecessary* one, from the point of view of the users. All it can do is hurt you.