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Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

Some people speculate whether the rise of SaaS is a response to FOSS, which made it difficult to monetise software development. I’ve certainly begun to question my previous automatic assumption that FOSS is a good thing in the long term.

The good news for FOSS is that hosting costs just keep getting cheaper, so providing free SaaS is increasingly feasible.

There’s also the “third way” of FOSS with a hosted option available. Wordpress is a good example of that. If deploying such projects on the cloud eventually becomes trivial, then you could imagine a FOSS desktop in the future might have a cloud component (or be entirely remotely hosted). That might sound odd, but consider you still need to buy hardware to run your FOSS on, so renting that hardware instead isn’t a great leap.

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Wordpress is an example of that for the simple reason that it is a CMS, which by its very nature implies it works in a server-client fashion. Of course Wordpress can be run as SaaS or self-hosted–it is software that needs to be hosted to serve its purpose.

On the other hand, editing vector graphics has no intrinsic need to be hosted. Just because a cloud-based FOSS desktop in the future could be imagined doesn't make it a reasonable idea. What would be the point, other than massively increasing complexity and points of failure in terms of reliability and security?

Lots of points, but the most obvious one is with SaaS you can deploy a single version of software, which makes it orders off magnitude less difficult to maintain.

I don't understand that argument. I sometimes use Inkscape but I never have more than a single version deployed on my device. Also, I don't think I'm putting any pressure on the maintainers if I were to insist on never updating from an older version.

Snarkiness aside, being able to "deploy a single version of software" is itself incompatible with the ability to self-host, making it a moot point for FOSS (let alone for FOSS that has no practical reason to be SaaS in the first place).

> but I never have more than a single version deployed on my device

Sure, but another user might have another version installed. That might be because their package manager is behind the latest release, for example.

Self-hosting means it's still FOSS and you don't need them if you really want to have your own install.

SaaS deployment means it's easier to maintain for the majority who don't care.

Until you have users that want a feature in an older version that's not in a newer one. Oh, and companies are always saying "nobody uses feature X, it was hard to maintain so we got rid of it" which is infuriating if you're a user of feature X.

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