Eric S. Raymond Calls SaaS 'Dangerous', 'Worse Than Proprietary Software' (ibiblio.org) 341
After Salesforce warned it retailers to stop selling military-style rifles, a larger issue was identified by Eric S. Raymond: software as a service.
If the provider decides it doesn't want your business, you probably have no real recourse. OK, you could sue for tortious interference in business relationships, but that's chancy and anyway you didn't want to be in a lawsuit, you wanted to conduct your business. This is why "software as a service" is dangerous folly, even worse than old-fashioned proprietary software at saddling you with a strategic business risk. You don't own the software, the software owns you.
It's 2019 and I feel like I shouldn'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. All of it. And you can't afford it to be tethered to a service provider even if the software itself is nominally open source. Otherwise, how do you know some political fanatic isn't going to decide your product is unclean and chop you off at the knees?
It's 2019 and I feel like I shouldn'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. All of it. And you can't afford it to be tethered to a service provider even if the software itself is nominally open source. Otherwise, how do you know some political fanatic isn't going to decide your product is unclean and chop you off at the knees?
military-style files?! (Score:5, Funny)
Would that file have a pistol grip? Would it have a wood handle, or just a few twists of duct tape?
Or is a military file somehow more dangerous than a civilian file? Is 'doc.txt' written by a military word processor somehow more lethal than 'doc.txt' written by notepad?
Sweet cheese and crackers, the editing here alone is worth the price of admission. Such comedy!
But dude has a point. He really does. This whole Salesforce thing is going to ignite a powder keg, no pun intended. I do hope they end up with major egg on the face and a few hundred million poorer.
Later to become Colonel Chicken. (Score:2, Funny)
I see what you did there.
Re:military-style files?! (Score:5, Funny)
There's a very important difference between Notepad and military word processors. Notepad allows you to format the text pretty much however you want within the confines of ASCII, while a military word processor defaults to putting everything in bullet points.
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And you can't open it from a gui, you have to use a shell.
I work for a Microsoft shop (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently there was some problem with the Microsoft licence authentication servers. Most of the team suddenly couldn't open and run Visual Studio any more. We hadn't done an upgrade or anything....it worked yesterday and refused to work today. Our software development was completely paralysed.
IT got it sorted it out. But it took a day. The department manager was frustrated and was complaining about how untenable it seemed that an error on Microsoft's part could have such an impact on our business. He clearly felt violated.
As he should have. As the whole company should have. Such behavior is UNACCEPTABLE! But for some reason, the owners are willing to take it. We just put up with it.
We could switch over to Linux. It would take quite a long time to recode our stack so that it would all work under Linux, not to mention updating our skill sets. That is too much of an inhibitor, so we are sticking with Microsoft and hoping it doesn't happen again.
Needless to say, I run Linux at home.
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Considering what happened to Manning and Assange, not selling military style files might be a good idea.
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Would that be a Bastard File Sir?
I personally favor a triangle crosscut to sharpen my axes, saws machetes and other sharp pointy things.
Files are awesome. All tools are.
OSS without a financial model is worthless (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, he's making some good points, but without a solid financial model underneath OSS, no business can rely on it. At least SaaS may involve a reputable company that is making money from the business and wants to continue making money--even if the business model ultimately comes down to some form of extortion. What is a business going to do if the key people supporting some critical OSS just walk away? Take away their birthdays?
As usual, I prefer to focus on solutions, which may qualify me as some sort of pariah on Slashdot. I think OSS should have at least one business model focused on (1) Cost recovery, (2) Fair compensation for work done, (3) Accountability for project completion, and (4) Success criteria accepted in advance by all of the involved parties. I think all of these objectives could be accomplished with a charity share brokerage, but if you disagree, then let's hear your better idea. Heaven forbid that you offer superior principles or thoughtful questions.
Re:OSS without a financial model is worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
In the OSS case, you can continue to use the software as-is for as long as you like. Presumably you will search for and find a replacement at your leisure, before the software becomes obsolete And because it's open source, if you wish you can hire your own developers to update the source for you (you can even post your updates back to the OSS repository if you like).
In the proprietary software case, you can continue to use the software as-is for as long as you like. Presumably you will search for and find a replacement at your leisure, before the software becomes obsolete. Or not (FORTRAN and COBOL code is still in use).
In the SaaS case, you're completely screwed. Your software either stops working immediately (if the software provider completely shut down), or it stops working at the end of your subscription (if for some reason the software provider doesn't like you anymore and refuses to renew your license). Both leave you with little to no time to find alternatives.
I've even seen a couple cases where a small business was shut down for a few hours or a day because their Internet happened to go down the exact day the SaaS decided it needed to phone home and re-validate that the computer it was running on was in fact authorized to run it. I always advise businesses reliant on the Internet (cloud or subscription services) to pay for a second form of Internet as a backup, even though it seems like you're throwing away money as long as your primary Internet stays up. But few business owners heed that recommendation.
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Really stretching to imagine any connection between what you wrote and what I wrote, notwithstanding your click on the "Reply..." option. By really stretching my imagination, I think your suggestion is that, in addition to having the expertise to run a business in a competitive manner, the business owner must also become an expert programmer who can maintain any OSS that the business depends upon.
If that interpretation is anywhere close to your intentions, then I refer you to David Ricardo and his explanati
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Almost true - most of them can run as-is, but there's a few that somehow break down.
The most common issues appear in the video game subset. Aside from systems no longer being available (countered by types of emulators), some of them had poor programming or a deprecated dependency that cause problems in the future. If you happen to have an old system or configuration that works, that's great, but hardware mi
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In the OSS case, you can continue to use the software as-is for as long as you like.
Right but who is maintaining it? Who's patching the latest openssh vulnerability in the system? Small businesses don't want to employ developers to do that, they want to contract that out to a specialist firm who can provide the functionality to them as a service. Just as an example look at Square's payment and point-of-sale system, I can definitely see why businesses use that, I'm not even sure what the OSS alternative is (if one even exists).
If you gain a monopoly for a service, you're god (Score:2)
If the product you use has 83-odd percent of the market, they can do anything they like to you, good or bad, and you have to eat it. if you switch to the competition, you lose 83% of your customers. Bye!
PS: duopolies like Rogers and Bell work too, as do oligopolies
Re:OSS without a financial model is worthless (Score:5, Interesting)
With OSS you can pay/hire someone to do the job if the key developers go away. With SaaS, if the company goes away so does your application, your platform AND your data.
Imagine all the HR databases in the world that are currently being migrated to things like SalesForce or Workday or any of the other big players and they suddenly go poof because one of those companies forgot to pay Amazon or is so far in debt they can no longer pay their Azure instances and some disgruntled tech that hasn't gotten a paycheck in 3 months simply pulls the plug. Companies don't just disappear overnight, they run massive debts both internal and external, not just financial but also technical, often hidden from investors and customers and then one day they simply close shop and if you're lucky, you'll get a 'sorry, we failed you' note.
And their customers ALL currently have 'ironclad' contracts. The same contracts that are worthless in bankruptcy proceedings because the first to get paid back is the bank and your data has now become an 'asset' of the bank ready to be monetized with or without you, but none of their data or code is in any sort of escrow. I'm just waiting for a company like Workday with a half-baked product (if you think PeopleSoft is bad, you have never had to work with them) and I can tell you from experience at least a dozen very large institutions will be officially bankrupt when that happens because they won't be able to run payroll, they won't be able to trace any of their income, contracts, expenses etc.
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There seems to be a LOT of confusion around here. I am certainly NOT defending SaaS, though some of your [guruevi's] criticisms are poorly aimed. Anyone who signs up for SaaS without some data export capability is truly too foolish for words.
My focus is on the failure of OSS to offer a superior business model. I have offered one constructive suggestion for an alternative approach to funding OSS to make it more effectively competitive. No one has offered any recognizable improvement over my suggestion. Actua
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The person you are replying to obviously has absolutely no experience in this part of the industry.
Re:OSS without a financial model is worthless (Score:5, Informative)
If an open source project does something you don't like, you've still got the software, can keep using it, and can fork the project and go your own way if you want to.
If a proprietary software vendor does something you don't like (like making their software all SaaS....) then you've still got the software and can keep using it. You can't fork it though.
Companies like Red Hat effectively do what you've suggested: they provide someone you can sue if promises aren't kept. But your real security is that you can do your own damned development if someone decides they don't want to do it for you.
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No, my suggestion is different. The project proposal should be checked and in a sense "certified" by the CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) before the shares go on sale. The proposal (which might be for a new feature, for support, for ongoing costs, or something else) would include the schedule, the resources (including people), the budget (including fair payment for the people who do the work), sufficient testing (and other aspects that might get overlooked), and, perhaps most importantly to my way of thinking,
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Or you know, if you're a business that wants to be able to count on an open source product continuing to be developed, you could pay for it in the form of donations, and encourage others to do the same. Just because you're allowed to use it for free doesn't mean that you can't give the developers some incentive to keep at it.
There are a number of projects that manage to operate that way quite well. It is an area that could use a lot more work though.
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I basically agree with this, though within the CSB context, I think share matching might be a better way to go. It can actually be problematic if a company has too much control over the project, but the CSB should be careful of protecting the degree of independence of each project for all the donors. I even think the donors should be limited to one share per project, at least in principle.
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What is a business going to do if the key people supporting some critical OSS just walk away?
Keep using the software. Possibly hire someone to improve it if needed.
Re: OSS without a financial model is worthless (Score:2)
The stream of commerce should be content neutral (Score:5, Interesting)
This can of worms got opened when the United States Supreme Court decided Hobby Lobby was a business entity that somehow also had religious beliefs. That seems to have emboldened management and shareholders to be much more bold about impressing their beliefs within the stream of commerce. Once more conservative groups get into the act (and they will), businesses will have to choose which competing groups to placate. This will be a disaster for everyone.
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Contraception, not abortion. HL had a first amendment right to restrict employee health plans despite state laws and regulations requiring the coverage of contraceptives in group health plans.
Re:Hobby Lobby isn't to blame for this (Score:5, Informative)
The four contraceptive methods challenged by Hobby Lobby were emergency contraceptive pills, Plan B and Ella, and intrauterine devices, ParaGrad and Mirena. The Hobby Lobby owners argued that under their religious beliefs, life begins when an egg is fertilized and that emergency contraceptive pills and intrauterine devices both have the potential to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. Hobby Lobby argued that those methods induced abortions by terminating fertilized eggs, which the owners objected to on religious grounds.
Hobby Lobby's health insurance plan offered other types of contraception that did not operate as abortifacients. Interestingly, that does not seem to have been widely reported.
Re:Hobby Lobby isn't to blame for this (Score:4, Informative)
So no, no coat hangers. I hope the cognitive dissonance isn't too difficult for you.
Re:Hobby Lobby isn't to blame for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Your little zing against religious freedom neglected two key differences:
1. Hobby Lobby wasn't forcing its views on its customers or suppliers that I am aware of, it was opposed to providing abortions as part of its health benefits. 2. What Salesforce is doing is directly dictating that otherwise legal commerce shall not happen through its services without any sort of compelling argument that it imposes unacceptable risk to them.
It is downright offensive to our intelligence to argue that these cases are comparable. Salesforce is doing this to paying customers who aren't even imposing a meaningful liability risk to them, FFS.
Then consider your intelligence insulted. You don't believe that it fits because your thinking is narrow and you miss the broader application.
Hobby Lobby is a corporation. A legal fiction. It doesn't exist except by fiat of government. Yet it has religious beliefs somehow and can exercise those beliefs under the 1st Amendment.
Saas is also a legal fiction that also doesn't exist except through fiat of government. It is now choosing to exercise broader 1st amendment rights to free association.
Previously much of this exercise within the stream of commerce was banned due to a string of Supreme Court decisions from the 1960's that said the stream of commerce was content neutral.
Should you actually care to educate yourself on the topic, start with Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States.
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Re:You only strengthen my case (Score:4, Informative)
Beware the precedents that you support for they may be used in ways you don't like.
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All the government has to do is say we don't recognize personal beliefs as a religion unless you are one of the last survivors of a known religion. From that, every person's religious beliefs in order to impact state policy must be shown to be part of an actual religious community that can provide an objective standard that delineates between personal beliefs and shared beliefs.
You have a right to espouse your personal beliefs, but only beliefs shared by a religious community should be considered a matter of religious freedom since religion is not a solitary practice.
That would be religious discrimination. And here you were previously screaming about "religious freedom". What you apparently really meant was "religious freedom" as a popularity contest.
As an aside, perhaps now you see why being "religion neutral" for a government is so hairy. Either they must recognize all of it, including the hokey weird shit, or they avoid discrimination by recognizing none of it in government functions.
When they start splitting hairs, they get people such as yourself who say "C
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Jennifer Government.
He's right (Score:2)
So imagine you are a business owner, and you have a choice:
1) Choose the option that will cost you more (make you uncompetitive) now, so you go out of business now.
2) Choose the option that will keep you in business for the next five years, but after five years cost you a lot.
Which one would you choose? No busi
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If you don't know how to hire good programmers, you're not going to have a good custom solution.
Unless you know how to hire people who know how to hire good programmers. Or can search the internet for how-to's on hiring good programmers. Or post to stackoverflow for recommendations. Or, you know, 'learn to code'!
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He's right...
Eric said:
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
SaaS can be dangerous, it also can be the public library allowing web search and showing the availability of a text along with the results. Or Wikipedia. Which is imperfect, to be sure, but also reasonably useful.
I'm not sure Eric Raymond doing cosplay is going to be enough to convince business leaders to understand "staying in control of our business."
Some of them might not even comprehend that if they don't physically control their tools, they can't guarantee availability of those tools. How do
Military type files (Score:2)
are the wurst. (Yeah I read the previous article about rifles)
SaaS is only moderately better than purchasing and licensing and managing software that will soon be in need of a costly upgrade or complete data structure changes.
Imagube is MS-Word or vim or emacs wouldn't allow you to edit files based on content...
Good (Score:2)
"..These types of rules are âoecorporate-policy virtue signaling..."
Yes, yes they are. That's kind of the entire point. One thing about Benioff, he has a bit of a code. Good for him. More than you can see about most Silicon Valley companies nowadays.
You don't like it, go elsewhere. No one is forcing you to do business with Benioff.
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That all well and good in the author's imagination (Score:2)
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Trapped? Or unwilling to change?
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Trapped, as in "It would cost more than we're willing to pay now to avoid going out of business later.".
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That's not trapped. That's the market working.
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You could liquidate your business (Score:3)
If you are a car dealership you aren't about to turn around and tell Ford, Toyota or VW to modernize their stuff or you won't work for them anymore.
It's a stretch, but if none of the suppliers that dominate an industry are willing to integrate with a business that chooses to use only ethical software, and you lack the capital to start a competing business that uses only ethical software, you could choose to liquidate your business and retrain for a different industry. For example, if no car maker is willing to work with a dealership that uses only free software, get out of the car industry and become a butcher, as bingoUV recommended [slashdot.org]. Comments by theja [slashdot.org]
historically (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies understood that expressing a political viewpoint was toxic to likely half their customer base and so most (smart) companies avoided.
Today, where anything-is-justified-if-you're-of-a-certain-side-of-poltics, that rule seems to have gone out the window. It seems to be more important to signal virtue to your side, than simply be a business that provides (X). And it's clear that certain internet mega-entities subscribe to this viewpoint: the political bias of google, facebook, twitter are all abundantly obvious. Whether they allow this bias to affect the services they provide is an open question (I think one side is convinced it already is, and one side would refuse to admit it no matter what evidence would be presented anyway).
Personally, even if I agreed with the politics of my supplier, there's no fuckin' way they're telling me how to run my business. Ever.
If you think this has nothing to do with the start of the US antitrust investigation of google, you're naive.
Better late than never, ESR... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Do you think we could get someone a little more photogenic to do videos for this cause? My vote's for Felicia Day, but she might not be available. How about someone from Big Bang Theory? I hear those people will be available soon, and their star recognition is still pretty good [youtube.com] for the time being.
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Exactly.
Nice to see ESR come around.
But it's worth remembering that since the 1990's he's been bashing RMS and the FSF in favor of his watered-down-business-friendly Open Source Initiative which lead exactly to the problems he's complaining about now.
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Perhaps it depends on your use case, but I found The GIMP to be more satisfactory to use for cel animation than the commercial alternatives. Many of which I tried.
OTOH, I've got to admit that I've never tried either FOSS or proprietary bookkeeping software, so you might be right there. And for tax software...yeah, you need to pay someone to keep the tax tables up to date, and unsure compliance with laws that change randomly.
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Like Apache OfBiz, for example: it has everything an accountant would need to run the books of a medium sized company, the sort of company that the little guys would see as "big."
But it doesn't have the ability to walk a non-accountant through all the steps to achieve some accounting task where all you know is the name of the thing you need to do. For that, you need Brandybrand(TM) bookkeeping software.
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Gimp's not good enough? There's even a lookalike/workalike Photoshop theme [omgubuntu.co.uk] for it.
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Sometimes the problem isn't with the software. Sometimes the problem is expecting an exactly identical free alternative.
Sometimes the sun is shining and sometimes its dark outside and the sun is not visible.
On Premise has the Same Issue (Score:2)
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"Premise"....I do not think that word means what you think it means.
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Only applies to online sales (Score:3)
Firearms can't be sold online anyway (in the USA). You have to go to the store and do your background check. So this really only affects parts. As a pro-2A person, I think the whole thing is despicable and disgusting, but people may be over-estimating the impact.
"Worldwide, customers may not use a Service to transact online sales of any of the following firearms and/or related accessories to private citizens..."
[omitted long list of firearms which, since they are firearms, can't be sold online in the USA anyway]
"Firearm Parts: magazines capable of accepting more than 10 rounds; flash or sound suppressors; multi-burst trigger devices; grenade or rocket launchers; 80% or unfinished lower receivers; blueprints for ghost guns; blueprints for 3D printed guns; barrel shrouds; thumbhole stocks; threaded barrels capable of accepting a flash suppressor or sound suppressor."
Note that they can still sell telescoping stocks and pistol grips. But most likely that is an accidental omission, and they will eventually amend it. As written, this will prevent them from selling a lot of AR accessories, but they can still sell AR-15's in store, just not online.
Also note that transfers to Federal Firearms Licensees (FFL) appear to be allowed. It is only transactions to "private individuals" which are barred by the new terms.
https://www.salesforce.com/con... [salesforce.com]
hmmm (Score:2)
"If the provider decides it doesn't want your business, you probably have no real recourse. OK, you could sue for tortious interference in business relationships"
Uh no, you can't. That's not what tortious interference in business relationships is for.
As for SaaS, it's a tough one. On the one hand there are so many reasons why I think it's a bad idea. On the other hand, if Eric Raymond is against it maybe I should give it another shot?
Little Late... (Score:2)
So yeah, kinda makes sense that the market panned out exactly like they wanted it to.
"Feature" not a bug (Score:2)
Of course software as a service is worse. Was that supposed to be secret? It's probably the clearest example imaginable of rent-seeking substituting for actual economic contribution.
Draw up the right contract (Score:3)
Businesses tend to adhere to contracts. Draw them up correctly and don't do business with shady shops. That's a no-brainer.
My company delivers SaaS. Clients submit workloads we process. Either because of incompetence or because of political reasons, our clients tend to reinvent the wheel every five years or so. We respect their rights of doing so and we never ever hold them hostage even when there's a dispute. The moment we'd cripple one of our clients, we'd start to see aggressive migrations away from our SaaS offering.
IANAL but I expect contracts for delivering physical goods and SaaS contracts have similarities when it comes to adhering to adhering to them by delivering good and services.
SaaS setup well allows for services to be outsourced like you'd do in any other type of business.
I once attended a speech by RMS where he vilified SaaS and my impression was that he had very little experience in how business run thier operations with partners. If we take the anti-SaaS POV to the extreme for physical processing then we should expect car makers to produce every single component of a car from raw materials. Pretty unrealistic for rather obvious reasons.
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if you rely solely on SaaS ... (Score:2)
... you're royally screwed. This is obvious to anyone with 2 cents worth of IT knowledge. Manage your own dependencies. At every level. Especially if they are mission critical to your business.
This is IT infrastructure 101. ESR is basically stating the obvious, but sadly, that needs to be done repeatedly from stopping people running into disasters.
expected more (Score:2)
expected more from the person who wrote cathedral and the bazaar, which was a very important OSS document when it was released.
how could he not have realized what SaaS is?
Re: Open source pusher says other things are bad (Score:2)
Re: Open source pusher says other things are bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Is your business able to avoid offending every person who is on earth now, or in the future?
The article you did not read is about salesforce threatening to dump a costumer who sells guns. Do you sell guns? Do you use energy in a way any environmentalist may consider wasteful? Did you or anyone at your company express a political opinion? Did you have a woke policy on transgender bathrooms twenty years ago? If so, your SAAS system may disappear at any time. Are you prepared for this?
Perhaps you think the benefits outweigh the risks. Fair enough, I do too. But you didnâ(TM)t know that this was the topic, because you made the classic slashdot blunder of assuming the summary reflected the contents of the article ;)
Re: Open source pusher says other things are b (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about? Seriously! Do you just do business with anyone just because they send you a check? Even if it's become illegal? Just because Huawei has a "must provide service" contract with you means you must continue even if they been banned?
Have you never dealt with Oracle, Microsoft, VMWare, IBM, Amazon, SAP, JDEdwards, Baan, Adobe, Autodesk, or any major supplier where you are a minor customer?
In the real world, customers have to rework their internal processes, create workarounds, or pay extra for "legacy" support quite often. In the old days, you just walled off that XP machine; make backups, and continue using it to fulfill your obligations.
With SaaS, you will lose the entire service. The big guys care but it still comes down to cost benefit to see if your check is worth the effort of fixing something that broke. Of course they will fix the errors that black list their entire customer base. You won't even see those F-ups, but most things less than that don't get addressed. Ask anyone who has to deal with that list above. All ESR is saying is that SaaS has one more risk on top of the other stuff.
And this extends beyond software. Walmart, Berkshire H, and various govt are the same in regards to changing protocols, contracts, & legalities.
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Just remember, we are on a slippery slope with some software companies. Salesforce targeting a company for selling legal items they don't like can turn into a company yanking your operational license because they didn't agree with your CEO's facial style or choice of makeup. With how EULAs are considered contracts, a cloud provider can waltz away with all your data, demand cash for a "maintenance fee", and hand it over to a competitor. Good luck suing them, because you have given them full access to the
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I don't care for what Salesforce is doing. But it's hardly the first time that an online company has denied service to a business because they don't like the product that the business sells.
Just ask anybody in adult products about the hoops they have to jump through to sell their products and accept payments. In some cases companies that DID offer services to them later withdrew those services. Examples include early PayPal customers from the Peter Thiel era (the company originally had no restrictions on wh
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You think Salesforce will kick my retail business off their service? Stupid.
If your business:
- Sells Guns or Gun parts.
- Offers a service to connect consenting adults for legal sex.
- Discusses and supports or caters to the straight hetro culture.
- Anything that doesn't tow the SJW agenda.
Absolutely. In many cases, it's already happened.
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SaaS megacorp says client side is inconvenient and more expensive.
More at 11.
Re:Open source pusher says other things are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
News at 11
This is the idiot who claimed that the GPL is obsolete [ibiblio.org]. He was only every an "open source" pusher in order to take away people's defences. Suddenly, late in the day, he realises that if you don't control your software you will never know what it can do to you. Sorry, it's late, but it's news. Raymond is finally admitting that Stallman had it right in 2008 [theguardian.com]. Most of us can work it out - Stallman has been right all along and Eric S. Raymond is a clown.
Re:Open source pusher says other things are bad (Score:4, Informative)
If SaaS is a problem then neither the BSD nor GPL license fixes it, so nothing has changed there. Now Stallman wrote some more philosophical/principal things and made the Affero GPL to combat SaaS but near as I can tell that's been pretty universally rejected, not just by this guy. Yes, technically it fixes that problem but only by becoming superviral requiring you to open source every service you use to make up the end user service. Which I guess is how it has to be, but in practice it makes it near impossible to be anything other than a pure open source shop.
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Old people are wise. Not always, as brilliantly demonstrated by my raving lunatic of a neighbor who always insisted "we really should have a new Hitler" right up to the day he died. But more often than not, they have insight that comes from the life experience younger folks lack.
So, yeah ESR. Prolly smells of stale urine, but he has important things to say.
Re: Just say no (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Just say no (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Just say no (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't really the software. It's the data. If your software vendor discontinues their product, or your OSS project of choice dies, changes license, or whatever, you've still got the software. If the data format isn't open then you're eventually screwed, but you've got some time.
If your SaaS provider dies, quits, or screws you, you're up shit creek, right now.
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The problem isn't really the software. It's the data. If your software vendor discontinues their product, or your OSS project of choice dies, changes license, or whatever, you've still got the software. If the data format isn't open then you're eventually screwed, but you've got some time.
If your oss project of choice dies, you have the source so even if they did use a proprietary data format, it would be trivial to pull that out and write a converter to move it over to your new format. It may cost you a few hours of developer time, but wouldn't it be worth it to higher one for a day or two to save your business?
There's also the added benefit of continued use of the software until the developer gets the conversion script working.
Re: (Score:2)
it would be trivial to pull that out and write a converter
For some definition of trivial that wholly includes the set of all difficulty levels.
I highly doubt many, if any, developers would obfuscate the code for data operations such that a competent developer would have difficulty finding it.
But you do have the source so there is some possibility of maintaining the program going forward, even if you're tied to it for the foreseeable future.
You really think it would take less resources to higher a full time developer to maintain the program than to higher one part time temporarily to create a script to convert the data? True, if you're so inclined, there's nothing stopping either option, so which ever one chooses is the best choice for them, and that, after all, is one major plus of open source
Re: (Score:2)
If a Free software project changes it's terms to something unacceptable, you just keep using the version you currently have under the old acceptable terms. You can even get together with others in the same boat and formally fork the project and continue development on it.
Try that with non-Free software and see how fast you end up in court!
Re: Just say no (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you ever actually exercise that option and put the data in another system?
If not, then I'd say "had an option for us to extract our data" is like saying a laid-off coal miner from West Virginia has an option to become an Opera Singer because the option to learn to sing is available.
Re:No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, yes. People are sleepwalking into a nightmarish world of mass surveillance, privacy raping and software customer lock-in.
I'm old enough to remember we computer people celebrating the end of the mainframe era thanks to personal computers that gave us freedom to run any software any way we'd want, not having to suck up to the BOFH to get time on the system, and not having to quit working when the terminal's telephone line went dead.
I'm staggered to see we're walking right back into the old model, only with fake personal computers that are nothing more than machines to run the modern terminal - called the "browser" - to contact the new mainframe - called the "cloud". Anybody with a long enough memory has been bashing their head on the wall for the past 10/15 years...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, yes, he is. At least in the open source world.
Re: (Score:3)
His thesis "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" helped convince Netscape to open-source their stuff, which is braggable.
However .... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, AOL bought Netscape the following year for 10 billion dollars. Whatever happened afterwards was AOL's fault.
Re: (Score:3)
Now imagine the same thing but for business. You're just a subscriber to a company that owns your entire financial workflow and can pull the plug whenever they want (or go out of business).
People are insane when they think these things would never happen to a big company like Salesforce or that they'll have time to migrate or get their data from a bankrupt company.
Key parties and key signing parties (Score:2)
The first time we actually crossed paths in real life was at a key party. (ESR is rather public about his polyamory so I'm not giving anything away here). Laugh if you will
What's to laugh about? A lot of people go to conferences to get their PGP keys signed.
Re:Open Source, is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the contrary: the GPL is more free because you can't make the code un-free.
Re: Canâ(TM)t fix stupid (Score:2)
There is a checkbox for that in iOS. Disable "smart"quotes.
Re: (Score:2)
I always thought "backup to Cloud" was backwards.
The Cloud is a convenient place for the primary/master service to be running. Whether salesforce for the sales department, or EC2 for the engineering department.
However it's important that companies have ***local*** and fully functional backups on their own infrastructure for if/when they want to leave their cloud vendor.