SaaS: Providing a Different Kind of Free

      by Wyatt Walter

For a couple of years now the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Richard Stallman have been speaking out against Software as a Service (SaaS) warning that one gives up some amount of freedom since the software is no longer on one’s machine. The FSF stands up for free as in freedom software, not free as in price, so if the source code is not freely available for reading, modification, and redistribution, then it’s not free by their definition. While that’s true, SaaS does offer another kind of freedom that can’t be as easily dismissed as Stallman says. That’s the freedom from traditional brick-and-mortar IT. Sure, somewhere along the line, there has to be a CPU, RAM, hard drives, and networking gear to run any software, you don’t have to do it yourself and be locked into the hardware you purchase. By using open source software products on SaaS providers’ platforms who offer direct access to the code, one can avoid this lack of freedom as Stallman suggests, but also maintain the freedom from having to maintain one’s own servers. Call me biased, but when deciding whether to run software on-site or choosing to host with a provider, one still has to consider this other form of freedom.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Apr 28th, 2009

One Response to “SaaS: Providing a Different Kind of Free”

  1. Wyatt Walter on freedom of open source Software as a Service (SaaS) Says:
    May 12th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    [...] Walter, one of DataSync’s network engineers, wrote an excellent post on why Software as a Service (SaaS) prevents vendor lock in and drives value: By using open source software products on SaaS providers’ platforms who offer [...]

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