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7 lines
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RMS issues ukase against Software as a Service – and I agree it’s an iffy idea
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<p>In a recent <a href="http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/stallman-discusses-free-softwa.html">O’Reilly interview</a>, Richard Stallman utters an anathema against software-as-a-service arrangements, calling them “non-free” and saying “you must not use it!” It would be easy to parody RMS’s style of uttering grave moralistic sonorities as though he were the Pope speaking ex-cathedra, but I’m going to resist the temptation because I think in this case his concerns are quite valid. </p>
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<p><span id="more-932"></span></p>
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<p>Richard says “If you do your computing on someone else’s server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it’s even harder for you to patch the program that’s running on someone else’s server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer.” </p>
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<p>He’s quite right about this. The connotations of “free” and “non-free” 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’t say you “must not”, that’s too moralistic for me, but I would say doing so is not wise or prudent.</p>
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<p>In general, I don’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’t go there. I recommend this rule to others as well.</p>
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