Indeed. The SaaS model allowed the software companies to have perfect control of their users. You might pay more and have unused accounts, but you’ll never pay less. It also was great for adoption because there was nothing to install. Salesforce was notorious for selling to penetrating an account by selling to individual sales people, then to sales teams, then sales departments, and only when everyone was already using it to the rest of the company and IT departments. The sales person could get started with a single account using a corporate credit card. Then, once hooked, there was value in getting a whole team onboard, etc. it was really brilliant.
It’s a bitter monkey paw irony: when you ask FOSS advocates how developers would be paid in a fully FOSS world where piracy cannot exist because all software is free, the answer is often “service contracts.”
The monkey paw curls. Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever.
It's the Westphalian system which includes not only (protestant) capitalism, but also scientific positivism, liberal humanism and everything else. Which we now call (post-/meta-)modern.
There's nothing we can do about all that and for practical reasons we just accept the world as is and tend to forget/ignore the reasons it is so. But for retaining cognitive sovereignty if think it's good to remember that.
I worked for a startup company that built and hosted our own custom systems, which were fairly specific to our company and production needs. Our production manager no longer wanted to pay for internal development, so he asked for a demo of a SaaS product from a Chinese company that sounded similar to ours. It turned out that they already had our source code, likely from a Chinese contractor that worked with our team a few years prior, because the product they were selling was almost exactly the same.
While we could not prove anything, it would seem that intellectual property theft just happens.
Today, we use tools daily that probably function because of intellectual property theft.
While this is traumatic to me, if I really try to be objective, aside from the additional theft of art, I don’t see how this is much different than what RMS and FSF stood for. Data finds a way to free itself.
The incentives were always misaligned, with having some code be free (open) and free (gratis), but the underlying system being value-extraction growth-obsessed capitalism. If processed food was sold for a profit based off farmers selling their produce for free, I don't know… the analogy makes me shiver.
Somehow we expect FLOSS coders and maintainers to do all this free labour to keep companies from paying the True Cost of everything. Externalities, externalities…
If I ever start another business, I hope I can set aside enough cash to support for the primary open-source tools that we depend on.
Was piracy a big problem in the enterprise world (which SaaS focuses on)? My understanding is that piracy is a big no-no for businesses. Nobody bothered to go after consumers but business is a different story.
Yes. I worked for a large company who made engineering software and we had all sorts of license checks that would ping our servers when an unlicensed copy pinged up.
We regularly found IPs linked to large companies using it and the licensing team regularly had a field day. Universities basically got a stern letter because there is no money in chasing those, but large companies certainly got contacted by licensing compliance.
Not especially in the developed world, but everywhere else it was rampant. I suspect one of the things pushing this business model was the ability to extract some profit from regions which would otherwise be paying zilch.
While reading the Fundamentals of Data-Engineering I noticed that one of the most practically interesting parts, data extraction/acquisition, is essentially skipped. The author just noted its 'grayness'.
That is web scraping is the SaaS form of 'piracy'.