I'll call it first: BS.

Having worked in High Performance Computing, I can say that there is nothing worse than a heterogenous workload. If you've got image processing, data mining, number crunching, and simulations all running on the same hardware and OS, you miss out on a lot of optimization. If you are only doing one of those, then you can get quite a bit more performance out of the hardware by tuning it properly. SaaS, by it's specialized nature, allows that tuning to take place. Running everything on your own machines just slows them all down.

Every day Stallman seems a little less unreasonable to me.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

In the shadow of Facebook, who would disagree with this?

Stallman's argument assumes there is an equivalent non-SaaS version of every service or that you should live without it if you can't get it as open source. I am giving up absolute control to use Google's search engine but it is not practical to build my own system to index the entire web with sub-second response times. If there was a distributed open source search engine project where a large number of people could pool resources to recreate something similar to Google that would be a different story.

The link is dead for me, but googling what others quoted yields this Guardian article from 2008:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.compu...

Markets for targeted SaaS solutions exists. Nobody is going to develop these for free and the businesses who need them are more than willing to pay (the value gained is much, much higher than the subscription fee). There are enough different businesses with the same need, that economically combined (through fees) they can support a team that develops the necessary software. These businesses are not going to collaborate with their competitors to develop the same software in a million years, but through SaaS providers, they basically do. Most of the people I know who work in software are basically involved in this at some level. It's not going away, and in many cases, it is really the only reasonable model.