Free Software, Free Society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman. 2nd edition.

The original purpose of web servers wasn’t to do computing for you, it was to publish information for you to access. Even today this is what most web sites do, and it doesn’t pose the SaaS problem, because accessing someone’s published information isn’t a matter of doing your own computing. Neither is publishing your own materials via a blog site or a microblogging service such as Twitter or identi.ca. The same goes for communication not meant to be private, such as chat groups. Social networking can extend into SaaS; however, at root it is just a method of communication and publication, not SaaS. If you use the service for minor editing of what you’re going to communicate, that is not a significant issue.

Services such as search engines collect data from around the web and let you examine it. Looking through their collection of data isn’t your own computing in the usual sense—you didn’t provide that collection—so using such a service to search the web is not SaaS. (However, using someone else’s search engine to implement a search facility for your own site is SaaS.)

E-commerce is not SaaS, because the computing isn’t solely yours; rather, it is done jointly for you and another party. So there’s no particular reason why you alone should expect to control that computing. The real issue in e-commerce is whether you trust the other party with your money and personal information.

Using a joint project’s servers isn’t SaaS because the computing you do in this way isn’t yours personally. For instance, if you edit pages on Wikipedia, you are not doing your own computing; rather, you are collaborating in Wikipedia’s computing.

Wikipedia controls its own servers, but groups can face the problem of SaaS if they do their group activities on someone else’s server. Fortunately, development hosting sites such as Savannah and SourceForge don’t pose the SaaS problem, because what groups do there is mainly publication and public communication, rather than their own private computing.

Multiplayer games are a group activity carried out on someone else’s server, which makes them SaaS. But where the data involved is just the state of play and the score, the worst wrong the operator might commit is favoritism. You might well ignore that risk, since it seems unlikely and very little is at stake. On the other hand, when the game becomes more than just a game, the issue changes.

Which online services are SaaS? Google Docs is a clear example. Its basic activity is editing, and Google encourages people to use it for their own editing; this is SaaS. It offers the added feature of collaborative editing, but adding participants doesn’t alter the fact that editing on the server is SaaS. (In addition, Google Docs is unacceptable because it installs a large nonfree JavaScript program into the users’ browsers.) If using a service for communication or collaboration requires doing substantial parts of your own computing with it too, that computing is SaaS even if the communication is not.

Some sites offer multiple services, and if one is not SaaS, another may be SaaS. For instance, the main service of Facebook is social networking, and that is not SaaS; however, it supports third-party applications, some of which may be SaaS. Flickr’s main service is distributing photos, which is not SaaS, but it also has features for editing photos, which is SaaS.

Some sites whose main service is publication and communication extend it with “contact management”: keeping track of people you have relationships with. Sending mail to those people for you is not SaaS, but keeping track of your dealings with them, if substantial, is SaaS.

If a service is not SaaS, that does not mean it is OK. There are other bad things a service can do. For instance, Facebook distributes video in Flash, which pressures users to run nonfree software, and it gives users a misleading impression of privacy. Those are important issues too, but this article’s concern is the issue of SaaS.

The IT industry discourages users from considering these distinctions. That’s what the buzzword “cloud computing” is for. This term is so nebulous that it could refer to almost any use of the Internet. It includes SaaS and it includes nearly everything else. The term only lends itself to uselessly broad statements.

The real meaning of “cloud computing” is to suggest a devil-may-care approach towards your computing. It says, “Don’t ask questions, just trust every business without hesitation. Don’t worry about who controls your computing or who holds your data. Don’t check for a hook hidden inside our service before you swallow it.” In other words, “Think like a sucker.” I prefer to avoid the term.

Dealing with the SaaS Problem

Only a small fraction of all web sites do SaaS; most don’t raise the issue. But what should we do about the ones that raise it?