Is SaaS a threat to Free Software?

Software as a Service is software delivery model where the application is hosted on a network server which can be accessed by users over the net and pay as per the usage instead of owning the software by paying the license fee. For example, a word processing program, which is installed on a network server and accessed by users to create and edit their document, can be termed as a SaaS application. Google Doc is an example of word processing program deployed as SaaS. SaaS has lot of positives as it take advantage of the 'economy of scale' and application standardization. For organizations, SaaS helps them to reach out to the global market. SaaS allows users to altogether do away with in-house servers, application and the need for software installation or maintenance, key reasons why they would opt to go the SaaS way. SaaS also poses a key threat to the software freedom, the core value embodied in Free Software movement.

As far as Free Software / Open Source paradigm is concerned, SaaS, by the very nature of the model, poses important concerns from its core philosophical perspective rather than from a technical / implementation perspective.

SaaS as a software delivery model strikes at the very core of the Free Software philosophy. It is not about implementation of the solution as such. A User of a SaaS application does not necessarily bother about whether the application is built by Open Source technology or not. The Users are using the service to perform their computational need (they submit their data to the application and get the computation done by the SaaS service). And SaaS by definition is not anyway wedded to the technology underneath with which the application is built.

Where the SaaS becomes a threat to the philosophy of Free Software, ie 'Freedom to the User of the software' is that SaaS makes the question of source code availability irrelevant and thus take away the 'means' of the User to control the behaviour of the software as per his/her needs (even if a SaaS provider agrees to distribute the source code and thus address the question of 'access to the software'). ie Even if the User gets the source code of the SaaS application, as long as the User is still using the SaaS service, his/her 'freedom' is as much as allowed by the service provider only. Both the data as well as the control (how the software behave) are with the provider and not with the User. Thus, SaaS might be seen as in the opposite camp to the spirit of 'Free Software'. In the SaaS world, availability of source code now no longer guarantees the 'Freedom' for the Users!