>"A proprietary program puts its developer or owner in a position of power over its users. This power is in itself an injustice."
This seems to be slightly ideologically loaded.
It is, until it happens to you. Then the recourse is HN/Twitter/Reddit. If you let yourself have your data exfiltrated, then your final answer is primarily bad PR and/or begging.
One example that sticks out in my mind is the Firebase debacle as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409 where costs went from $25/mo to $1700/mo . Because of the extraordinary bad reporting across tech media, their C*O positions responded in kind. This could have ended in a multitude of much worse outcomes, since this is software as a service (aka: data ransom)
Isn't it understood that that's what that potentially could be? I have my photos in the Google Cloud knowing that they'll stay there only as long as I can pay for the service. I trust they won't raise their prices like that, but I have no control over it, and if they do, yeah, that's something unethical going on. What is the alternative to SaaS though? SaaS is not only the software, it's also the cloud, and I have a real hard time arguing that charging someone to use the hardware is some sort of physical malware.
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It is, until it happens to you. Then the recourse is HN/Twitter/Reddit. If you let yourself have your data exfiltrated, then your final answer is primarily bad PR and/or begging.
One example that sticks out in my mind is the Firebase debacle as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409 where costs went from $25/mo to $1700/mo . Because of the extraordinary bad reporting across tech media, their C*O positions responded in kind. This could have ended in a multitude of much worse outcomes, since this is software as a service (aka: data ransom)
https://startupsventurecapital.com/firebase-costs-increased-...
Isn't it understood that that's what that potentially could be? I have my photos in the Google Cloud knowing that they'll stay there only as long as I can pay for the service. I trust they won't raise their prices like that, but I have no control over it, and if they do, yeah, that's something unethical going on. What is the alternative to SaaS though? SaaS is not only the software, it's also the cloud, and I have a real hard time arguing that charging someone to use the hardware is some sort of physical malware.