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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

When I first saw SaaSS I figured RMS had his own acronym for SaaS, and sure enough further in the article he spells it out - Service as a Software Substitute.

I like it!

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I think it detracts from his message when he uses these derogatory nicknames in anything other than in introduction. Like when he's talking about the "Swindle" (kindle), he will refer to it that way throughout the entire article, rather than just make a point an move on.

Services are offered in substitute for software precisely because IP has become socially, legally, and technically impossible to protect, so the only way to protect it is to put it behind an API gate, which (ironically) offers far less Freedom than any copy of Windows ever did.

After all, your copy of Windows never forced deprecation of API functionality you wanted to use.

Isn't 'substitute' implicit? I don't see the point.

It is implicit, the point is this makes it explicit.

But why? It's obvious. Making it explicit has no benefit, and makes you waste a bunch of words explaining yourself.

Making it explicit has the benefit of making people actually think about who has control over the computers they are using.

Saying it's a service already makes the control explicit. Adding the word 'substitute' does nothing on that front.

It seems to me that people rarely think about the software behind a service, this is a mechanism to bring that secret software into people's minds and discussions.

Obvious, and emphasized, are very different things!

There are cases where the service is not substituting software. E.g., something like Stripe or Twilio... versus software which is offered as a service because it's a nice form of DRM.

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