[api]

I'll put it rather bluntly: present-day open source is largely free labor for SaaS companies.

SaaS, meanwhile, is the least open and least free model of software distribution, significantly less open or free (as in freedom) than closed-source commercial software you run yourself. This model, SaaS, is powered from the ground up by open source, and most SaaS gives little or nothing back. Some SaaS is not much more than a management and UI layer built around pre-existing open source standards and code.

Something is very wrong if open source exists largely to enable the least free model of software distribution. Open source as currently conceptualized is stuck in the pre-SaaS eras of the 1980s and 1990s and refuses to adapt to what "free" and "open" mean in the new landscape.

It doesn't help that the OSI is fully captured by companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta with a vested interest in promoting the SaaS and cloud-first model. If local-first ever gained traction it would be a threat to not just their SaaS products but their incredibly lucrative cloud businesses.

[phkahler]

>> I'll put it rather bluntly: present-day open source is largely free labor for SaaS companies.

I've used Free Software and Open Source over 20 years and have never paid a SaaS company a dime.

OTOH the most valuable software that I regularly use is Free Software as opposed to Open Source Software. So maybe the OSS really is primarily free labor for SaaS?

[api]

I'm an OG open source user too. I installed Slackware Linux with kernel 0.99.15 from a stack of floppies as a teenager.

You're part of a very, very small minority. I'm talking about the majority of developers and what the majority of users experience.

What most users are experiencing today is an aggressively non-free non-open zero-privacy rent-seeking software environment that is enabled by open source under the hood. This seems contrary to the stated goals of free software.

[phkahler]

>> What most users are experiencing today is an aggressively non-free non-open zero-privacy rent-seeking software environment that is enabled by open source under the hood. This seems contrary to the stated goals of free software.

That's why GPL is the preferred license for user freedom. HN is by its nature full of people who want to develop stuff for profit. Maybe it's time to stop hanging around here.

[hodgesrm]

> SaaS, meanwhile, is the least open and least free model of software distribution.

Less free and less open than Oracle DBMS? That seems like a stretch.

[api]

Very much so. When you run Oracle DBMS you have your own data in your custody. You also have the software and the ability to spin it up in the future. It’s a binary blob but there’s VMs and longer term emulation for that. I can run MS-DOS software for 16-bit x86 just fine on my ARM64 Mac. This includes unmodified commercial closed source software from decades ago.

With SaaS you usually don’t have your data let alone the code. The app cannot be run by anyone but the ones running it. Old versions can’t be run. If the company goes away it’s gone forever along with the data.

A lot of SaaS is tied to a specific cloud with its specific managed services, so it can’t even be moved between cloud providers without significant effort.