[_phred]

a.) Yes, there are some privacy and ownership/property problems that legislation could possibly solve, but… b.) more laws makes it harder and less fun to write, distribute, and profit from making software.

However, I do think that a legal recourse for users to be able to export all of their data from a service in some format makes sense, especially when said data are entrusted to software startups that have a proclivity for being bought, sold, and swiftly unsupported or end-of-life'd at the drop of a hat.

Or, simpler, and less encumbering: how about a developer-initiated consortium of companies who "won't screw you over" when it comes time to back-up or find a new home for your data? Something like a Better (Software) Business Bureau who promises not to leave you high and dry… but now I'm just having excessively utopian thoughts.

[thaumaturgy]

I don't think the practical risk here justifies any such thing, because all of this is occurring in a market with possibly one of the lowest barriers-to-entry of any market in human history. With the ubiquity of screen scrapers, the power of various programming languages and environments, and the interconnectedness of the web, any attempt to jail your data can usually be met, quickly, by a large number of people.

For example: back when Facebook was really irritating everyone, Diaspora came along. Now, Diaspora should probably be considered a failed project at this point, but along the way there was a not-small number of developers that came forward and said, "hey, I already did this, start with my code...", and if the anger over Facebook hadn't subsided, I have no doubt that at least one of those projects would have become successful.

Or, for another example: when word got leaked that Yahoo was going to "sunset" Delicious, it took me all of a few bucks and a couple of clicks to export every last one of my bookmarks to Pinboard. (Thanks Pinboard!)

Proprietary software, by contrast, carried much greater risk, because it often used secret data formats which were extremely difficult (or impossible) to reverse-engineer, and because it was much more difficult to scrape the data from the screen in a reliable way. I have direct experience with this: small grocery stores tend to use a product called NCR ScanMaster, which at least semi-recently was "powered" by a truly atrocious Btrieve database backend, which was unreadable without the schema files, which nobody would give you without lots of money. It was damned hard to reverse-engineer too; I have a proud history of that kind of thing, and it totally stumped me for all but the simplest of data extractions.

One of my clients needed to be able to make special sale-related changes to large numbers of products on a regular basis without paying someone to sit there and key it in all day (and make mistakes while they were at it). We eventually came up with using AutoHotKey to control the screen and data fields, but even that was rather challenging because of ScanMaster's variable time delays between screens and AutoHotKey's limitations.

Contrast that with anything web-related, where I could use PHP or Javascript & Greasemonkey or one of any of a number of solutions to parse and scrape the content of any site within a matter of hours.

I can't read the article right now -- the site is down -- but the thing about Stallman is that he's a radical, and he will see his epic foe everywhere he looks. Cloud computing and SaaS have become popular, and are replacing many aspects of traditional desktop computing, but if he's making the claim that there is just as much danger, in terms of personal freedom, with cloud computing and SaaS as there was with proprietary desktop software or timesharing systems, well, he's just plain wrong.

He's also, in this context, probably completely irrelevant. I suspect that his opinions of cloud computing or SaaS will have epsilon impact on the industry, no matter how loudly or oft-stated.