Here's a list of related projects or statements and an extract from their introduction or preamble.
Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services
The current generation of network services or Software as a Service can provide advantages over traditional, locally installed software in ease of deployment, collaboration, and data aggregation. Many users have begun to rely on such services in preference to software provisioned by themselves or their organizations. This move toward centralization has powerful effects on software freedom and user autonomy.
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Software as a Service (SaaS) has become extremely popular in the last few years, demonstrating a number of benefits to users and developers, including:
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Unfortunately, SaaS has historically been antithetical to many of the goals advanced by free software and open source. Among the restrictions typical of many SaaS systems:
Open Software Service Definition
An online service, also known under the title of Software as a Service (SaaS), is a service provided by a software application running online and making its facilities available to users over the Internet via an interface (be that HTML presented by a web-browser such as Firefox, via a web-API or by any other means).
With an online-service, in contrast to a traditional software application, users no longer need to ‘possess’ (own or license) the software to use it. Instead they can simply interact via a standard client (such as web-browser) and pay, where they do pay, for use of the ‘service’ rather than for ‘owning’ (or licensing) the application itself.
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Data portability is the ability for people to reuse their data across interoperable applications. The DataPortability Project works to advance this vision by identifying, contextualizing and promoting efforts in the space.