{"id":8338,"date":"2019-06-01T09:47:53","date_gmt":"2019-06-01T13:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8338"},"modified":"2019-06-01T13:45:15","modified_gmt":"2019-06-01T17:45:15","slug":"the-dangerous-folly-of-software-as-a-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8338","title":{"rendered":"The dangerous folly of &#8220;Software as a Service&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Comes the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.seattletimes.com\/business\/tech-giant-brings-software-to-a-gun-fight-salesforce-bars-its-customers-from-selling-firearms\/\">word<\/a> that Saleforce.com has announced a ban on its customers selling &#8220;military-style rifles&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The reason this ban has teeth is that the company provides &#8220;software as a service&#8221;; that is, the software you run is a client for servers that the provider owns and operates.  If the provider decides it doesn&#8217;t want your business, you probably have no real recourse.  OK, you could sue for tortious interference in business relationships, but that&#8217;s chancy and anyway you didn&#8217;t want to be in a lawsuit, you wanted to conduct your business.<\/p>\n<p>This is why &#8220;software as a service&#8221; is dangerous folly, even worse than old-fashioned proprietary software at saddling you with a strategic business risk. You don&#8217;t own the software, the software owns you.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s 2019 and I feel like I shouldn&#8217;t have to restate the obvious, but if you want to keep control of your business the software you rely on needs to be open-source. All of it.  <em>All<\/em> of it.  And you can&#8217;t afford it to be tethered to a service provider even if the software itself is nominally open source.<\/p>\n<p>Otherwise, how do you know some political fanatic isn&#8217;t going to decide <em>your<\/em> product is unclean and chop you off at the knees? It&#8217;s rifles today, it&#8217;ll be anything that can be tagged &#8220;hateful&#8221; tomorrow &#8211; and you won&#8217;t be at the table when the victim-studies majors are defining &#8220;hate&#8221;. Even if you think you&#8217;re their ally, you can&#8217;t count on escaping the next turn of the purity spiral.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s disregarding all the more mundane risks that come from the fact that your vendor&#8217;s business objectives aren&#8217;t the same as yours.  This is ground I covered twenty years ago, do I really have to put on the Mr. Famous Guy cape and do the rubber-chicken circuit again?  Sigh&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Business leaders should learn to fear every piece of proprietary software and &#8220;service&#8221; as the dangerous addictions they are.  If Salesforce.com&#8217;s arrogant diktat teaches that lesson, it will have been a service indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Comes the word that Saleforce.com has announced a ban on its customers selling &#8220;military-style rifles&#8221;. The reason this ban has teeth is that the company provides &#8220;software as a service&#8221;; that is, the software you run is a client for servers that the provider owns and operates. If the provider decides it doesn&#8217;t want your&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8338\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The dangerous folly of &#8220;Software as a Service&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8338"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8341,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338\/revisions\/8341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}