Re: Please review codeberg.org

[Yuchen Pei]

bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> writes:

> On Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:03:45 +1000 Yuchen wrote:
> > A forge defined this way does hosting / publishing and 
> > communication only, not computation, thus it should not be 
> > considered SaaSS.
>
> its a valid point - i believe there was an unwritten implication
> in that quote though - it was implied that the those tasks could
> not be accomplished on ones own computer

I was also under the impression that whether a task counts as 
SaaSS depends on the significance of the computation in the tasks, 
but re-reading the essay I don't think that is true.

Rather it is about computing tasks where the activity does not 
inherently involve anyone else (see the section "How Service as a 
Software Substitute Takes Away Your Freedom" in the SaaSS 
essay). An example would be editing a photo, and a non-example 
would be publishing like posting blogposts and communications like 
mailing lists.

> surely, some people do not have a reliable internet connection
> - for those people, a freebie service may be the only option; 
> but
> self-hosting is possible, and hosting is affordable
>
> i think that the "gist" of the SaaSS definition, is that it
> covers any computing task, which could be done on one local
> machine, or at least one controlled by the user

and which does not require communications with someone else's 
computers.

> perhaps publishing is not a significant computation; but forges
> do much more than publishing - they are complete applications -
> they actually simulate several discrete applications (bug
> tracking, code review, signature verification, forum, mailing
> lists) - also live alerts / web-hooks / @mentions, third-party
> API integrations, and other webby bells-and-whistles

Code review, forum and mailing lists are all communications so 
should not count as SaaSS. Not sure about bug tracking, signature 
verifications, live alerts, web-hooks, mentions, as that depends 
on the definition of these functionalities.

Take mentions for example. Say the functionality is you get an 
notification when someone @you in an issue tracker. Is this SaaSS?

Suppose Forge A sends an email to the user for every issue message 
like most forges do, then you can set up the notification by you 
own using the mail client. So it is SaaSS.

Suppose Forge B does not offer the service of sending an email for 
every message in the issue tracker and it does not offer an API 
for clients to grab messages? The user will then need to write a 
parser and have to be mindful about the rate of requests sent to 
the forge service. But assuming the user has no way of getting 
these messages without using the forge web service, then it is not 
considered SaaSS by the definition, because there's no way of 
getting the notification without communicating with the server. So 
the mention functionality is not considered SaaSS.

Clearly Forge A gives users more control than Forge B, so it feels 
wrong to fail Forge A on SaaSS criterion because of this.

What do you think?

Perhaps the SaaSS essay needs an update to cover the 
bells-and-whisles. For one thing, the FSF Member Forum (a 
discourse forum) has the mention notification functionality.

I think the general problem with deciding or ensuring that a 
service is not SaaSS, is that it is much harder to do so than 
deiciding or ensuring a piece of software is free, because for the 
latter we just need to check the license or stamp it with a free 
license and let the license and the copyright law do the heavy 
lifting, but for the former we have to do detailed analysis of the 
functionalities of the service.

Best,
Yuchen

--
PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040  4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature