Re: [gap-discuss] ANN: DataBasin 0.4

[Richard Stallman]

    It can become even more fuzzy as the instruments used for
    observation combine both measurement and computation. These
    devices are almost exclusively proprietary and expensive, so labs
    must send genetic material to a company which performs the
    measurement and computation, thus SaaS, for them. Doesn't sound
    very much like freedom does it?

I am not sure.  Correct me if I have misunderstood, but I think the
company is doing a physical measurement and then analyzing it,
providing the analyzed result.  It seems that the computing is
ancillary to the measurement itself.  If so, I would not say it is
SaaS.

    An argument might be made that this scientific data should be free
    anyways, except it can put a person's individual liberty at
    risk. What if that DNA was your own?

I don't think your DNA data should be public, but these two issues are
separate ones.

    So while I agree with some of the basic tenants of your SaaS
    essay, I feel the broad statements of "Don't use SaaS!" and "this
    is always bad" inhibits scientific progress.

When a practice that denies people freedom becomes widely accepted,
several phenomena put more pressure on people to follow it.  (One is
the network effect.)  Thus, if we resist it, we will less often find
we are pressured to do it.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
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