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Comment by rplst8 | Hacker News Reader

> The incentive in the cloud age is to create dysfunctional products that provide an illusion of permanence instead of the reality of tangibility. I expect this is only going to become a bigger problem over time.

Isn't this what SaaS is all about?

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Well more specifically it's one of the longstanding arguments against SaaS as a concept.

It's a tired tune to say that RMS was right, but he was. Letting people be controlled by software is not a good idea for pragmatic reasons that go beyond mere morality.

I think it is up to everyone to weight the pros and cons of using SaaS. Many entreprises would not even exist if they had to build and maintain their stack themselves.

Also, I would not equivocate not controlling your software with being controlled by it. In some cases maybe, but definitely not all.

There are shades of grey in SaaS implementations, though. That the product is operated through a third-party server doesn't always imply it needs to be only available when you're on-line, and doesn't imply that your data needs to be taken hostage. A big part of the problem here is what 'stillkicking mentioned - doing away with files. Instead of data files, you have "documents" (meaning specific to a service). You can no longer open them independently, copy to local storage, or e-mail it to a friend - you're restricted to "sharing" them within the platform. This is not a technical necessity. It's just driven by business model.

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