RMS issues ukase against Software as a Service &#8211; and I agree it&#8217;s an iffy idea
<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>
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<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>
<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>
<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>
