Is playing Nexuiz online SaaSS? RMS seemed to think so here, in the original version of Who Does That Server Really Serve?: http://www.bostonreview.net/richard-stallman-free-software-DRM Interestingly enough, the passage where he mentions games is no longer in the current updated version on the GNU website.
I personally don't share his view. I don't think that multiplayer games are SaaSS because (in the case of an FPS like Nexuiz or a strategy game like FreeCiv) each user still runs her own copy of the game- the server is simply an instance of the game that just so happens to be the centre of information exchange for the other instances. The only information actually on the server that would normally be on the user's own computer is arbitrary data like the state of play and the score. If several people decided to play Monopoly, each recording the state of play on their own boards (the separate programs, in this allegory) and communicating through a 'postmaster' who controlled the flow of correspondence (the server), there is no SaaSS, because no one is doing anyone else's computing for them. How is this SaaSS?
