{"id":932,"date":"2009-04-27T11:02:24","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T16:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=932"},"modified":"2010-07-19T00:32:50","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T05:32:50","slug":"rms-issues-ukase-against-software-as-a-service-and-i-agree-its-an-iffy-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=932","title":{"rendered":"RMS issues ukase against Software as a Service &#8211; and I agree it&#8217;s an iffy idea"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent <a href=\"http:\/\/broadcast.oreilly.com\/2009\/04\/stallman-discusses-free-softwa.html\">O&#8217;Reilly interview<\/a>, Richard Stallman utters an anathema against software-as-a-service arrangements, calling them &#8220;non-free&#8221; and saying &#8220;you must not use it!&#8221;  It would be easy to parody RMS&#8217;s style of uttering grave moralistic sonorities as though he were the Pope speaking ex-cathedra, but I&#8217;m going to resist the temptation because I think in this case his concerns are quite valid.  <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Richard says &#8220;If you do your computing on someone else&#8217;s server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it&#8217;s even harder for you to patch the program that&#8217;s running on someone else&#8217;s server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer.&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s quite right about this.  The connotations of &#8220;free&#8221; and &#8220;non-free&#8221; are rather  beside the real point, which is a pragmatic one.  It can be risky to give up control of your data, and becoming dependent on a SaaS or cloud  service is not something to do casually.  I wouldn&#8217;t say you &#8220;must not&#8221;, that&#8217;s too moralistic for me, but I would say doing so is not wise or prudent.<\/p>\n<p>In general, I don&#8217;t allow myself to rely on such services.  And I have a rule: unless I can get all my data back through some sort of export or dump function in a non-obfuscated format, I won&#8217;t go there.  I recommend this rule to others as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent O&#8217;Reilly interview, Richard Stallman utters an anathema against software-as-a-service arrangements, calling them &#8220;non-free&#8221; and saying &#8220;you must not use it!&#8221; It would be easy to parody RMS&#8217;s style of uttering grave moralistic sonorities as though he were the Pope speaking ex-cathedra, but I&#8217;m going to resist the temptation because I think in&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=932\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">RMS issues ukase against Software as a Service &#8211; and I agree it&#8217;s an iffy idea<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932","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=932"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2326,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions\/2326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}