zlacker

“Open source” is free labor for SaaS companies, while the insistence on liberal free (as in beer) licenses makes it almost impossible to build a software business in any other way by flooding the market.

SaaS is the least free model for software. You have no privacy, no control, and in most cases can’t even export your data.

Thus open source actually minimizes freedom in practice, at least for everyone other than developers.

>>api+(OP)
Exactly! FOSS has been the unwitting enabler behind locking people down in giant SaaS silos.

>>kazina+X3
I’ve seen this for years but so far it’s been hard to get others to see it. It requires holistic “systems thinking.” You have to go beyond the letter and the intent of the license or the open source movement and look at the overall effect it has on the incentive structure of the market.

It’s extremely common for well intentioned policies and movements to have perverse effects that aren’t anticipated because the effect emerges from the whole system rather than from any single part in isolation.

The effect of a thing is pretty much unrelated to its intent, hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The root problem is that humans are awful at understanding how a policy will manifest when embedded in a complex system.

I think this is also why every attempt at central planning a whole society ultimately fails.

>>api+0a
I'm not convinced. The moment software could be released half baked, then patched later, the door for subscription pricing was open. Then the browser growing into an application platform moved things onto the server where it was easier to update things.

FOSS may have accelerated things slightly, yet the mediocre quality and incompleteness held back its impact for a long time. Server side those deficiencies were less visible and could be addressed more gradually. Ultimately I think SAAS was inevitable as everything shifted online. Now even single-player, closed source games require an Internet connection.

>>kazina+X3
Note that it's specifically liberal licenses - the stuff powering SaaS tends to be Apache-, MIT or similar licensed. Most of the big SaaS vendors won't touch GPL code, much less AGPL.