[atomicnumber3]

"The reality is that we painted ourselves into a corner with free-as-in-beer, "information wants to be free," etc."

Personally I kind of view it the other way around. We weren't the painters here, just observers. "Information wants to be free" is phrased that way because, whether we want it to be or not, it is just a fundamental fact that it is very easy to copy bits. And - while you can make it damn annoying to be sure - if you want a user to be able to see the bits on their screen, there is going to be a way to break DRM. So - we can either acknowledge this, embrace reality, and figure it out from there, or we can shove our heads in the sand and wave our arms about yelling "intellectual property!!" and ask the local monopoly on violence to help us do so.

I agree that SaaS is often used to skirt the piracy stuff. I also agree that SaaS encouraging you to give up ownership of your data is bad. But also I think SaaS being on the other side of a network forces a function that's actually useful - they're assuming the risk, the ops burden, and so on. You get to just shoot IP packets at them, which I find is typically a comfortable position to be in. And frequently I find that that is actually why SaaS is so valuable. Part of the reason that enterprises pay for SaaS is because it lets them offload business complexity, operational burden, etc. So i think SaaS isn't just a categorical moral hazard.

"It's hard to make money in software by doing things to make peoples' lives better or increase their freedom. It's easy to make money with rent extraction schemes, addictionware, dark patterns, and outright scams. It's like this market is full of people who want to be screwed and refuse to pay for anything that doesn't screw them."

This is absolutely an accurate take on the current B2C software ecosystem. If it's not B2B software, it's probably predatory in at least some way. And if it's not "productivity" software, it's probably a literal horror of bad actors. Humans just weren't ready to have nightmare rectangles in their pockets 24/7 and our monkey brains are far too easy to game into exchanging money for dopamine microdoses at far too egregious of an exchange rate.

[api]

These are good points, but I disagree somewhat about the ops burden issue of SaaS. The ops burden issue is due to problems that are all solvable, and if people paid for software there would be a strong incentive to solve them. Instead we've revived the technicians in white coats tending a mainframe model because that turns out to be what people will pay for, and I think this is mostly because the model doesn't give them other options.

Edit: also while there is a marketing distinction between B2C and B2B ultimately everything is B2C. B2B is just B2C at least one level removed.

[parentheses]

It is definitely true that the safest-for-user model is to use web software - it's the most secure sandbox that's commonly available and has good hardware access. The safest-for-company model to monetize is SaaS. It kind of makes sense that we are where we are.

There's a perverse dislike of delivering software over the web because we want binaries, but the same is true with hardware. You only license the proprietary hardware, so you can't do anything with it. The fact that it's a physical object you hold is purely how it's delivered.

We see companies that protect revenues while charging users for real services as somehow criminal. I spend about $100 per month on various subscriptions and I feel I benefit from those services immensely! I don't like not having MP3s which I can hold and copy, but I also like having all of the Spotify library to enjoy. It's all trade offs.