Richard Stallman wrote: > Here is my first contribution to the open-source world, and first > meaningful chunk of emacs-lisp! :-) > > Thanks for contributing to Emacs -- but please don't refer to our > community with the term "open-source". That is an amoral approach to > the issue, and we disagree with it. What we do is called "free software". > > (Your name looks French; in French it is called « logiciel libre ».) > > Google translation suffers from a problem: it is Software as a > Service. I'm writing an article about why that is a bad thing for > users' freedom. > >
Hi, Software as a Service here is a misleading term IMHO, even if used by many. Google doesn't deliver any peace of software, while doing translations via its API. You don't get Software as a Service here, the service it does, is just not delivering software. As the name says, software is a ware, something you may buy, a value. Seems useful to discriminate between distribution of a possible ware or providing a service, which may but must not be done with computers. Precisely the user sends a peace of text and gets back a peace of text. That's a plain translation-service, whoever it did. The problem with this kind of SaaS is, that it isn't SaaS, because you don't get the Software as a Service, it's hidden from you, the term is deceiving... Behind it's API a huge amount of knowledge is collected. A monopoly of knowledge is a danger for all others. So far I'm well concerned too and looking forward for your article. Best regards, Andreas _______________________________________________ gnu-emacs-sources mailing list gnu-emacs-sources@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-emacs-sources
