moxalt wrote:
In the same way that the issue with proprietary software is not necessarily that it is directly abusing the user (in many cases it is not) but a matter of principle.
Then this is where you differ with the free software movement. Proprietary software mistreats each of its users by not granting users the 4 freedoms of free software. For free software activists, the lack of these freedoms are the principle by which proprietary software is dismissed out of hand. There's no way to defend your assertion that proprietary software is not mistreating its users because one cannot study, alter, distribute, or sometimes even run a proprietary program.
If you believe that proprietary software is not "directly abusing the user" then it would seem you don't actually agree with the free software movement. The free software movement posits (with remarkable evidence) that proprietary software is ethically wrong.
The issue at stake here is not what the operator could potentially do or not, but whether the practice of using someone else's server for communicating between instances of a game is actually SaaSS or not, and whether it should thus be rejected on principle. I don't think it is.
There's nothing clarifying about a program being a game; we need to understand what a specific program actually does in order to comment on whether that program is Service as a Software Substitute. Therefore one shouldn't make broad generalizations such as what you've written above. Determining what the operator could do is determining the scope of what harm the user could suffer. I believe that is the basis of Stallman's analysis of when SaaSS is inconsequential and can be dismissed, versus when SaaSS is dangerous and ethically wrong.
