Owned Software Manifesto

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Software as a Service (SaaS) and the rise of rent-seeking

The world of Saas brought us a world of benefits, convenience, and accessibility in a time where it was difficult to install, configure, and run your software.

For the last 20 years, Software as Service (SaaS) transformed how the world accessed software. On the early days of computing, Software was purchased in a box, written on physical media such as floppy disks and CD-ROMs, and installed on a computer. The software you purchased was yours to own, and you had the right to run it as you saw fit. It wouldn't expire, delete all your data once payment was missed, or lock you out of your own data - the caveat was that you had to manage it yourself, and if the software required servers or a complex setup, you had to manage that too.

Then came SaaS to save the day. Forget servers, installation disks, compacity planning, and backups. Just sign up, pay a monthly fee, and you're good to go. The software would be updated automatically, and you could access it from anywhere in the world. It was a revolution in software delivery, and it changed the way we interacted with software.

But with this revolution came a price. As everything became web-based and server infrastructure evolved into the cloud, we saw a shift in the way software was delivered, consumed, controlled, and ultimately how it was owned. This change in ownership came about for convenience, but allowed a whole industry to be built on top of rent-seeking and dependency.

The world welcomed this rent-seeking model with open arms, and the idea of owning software became a figment of the past. The idea of owning software was replaced with the idea of renting software, and the idea of owning your data was replaced with the idea of renting access to your data. This shift in ownership was so subtle that it went unnoticed by most.

As the internet and the web became intertwined with our lives and the global economy, our reliance on SaaS grew. Most companies now rely on dozen of SaaS solutions that if taken away, would cripple their operations. This high level of dependency on SaaS created a new dynamic - instead of rent-seeking, we are now held hostage by the software we use. If the ramsom is not paid monthly (or yearly), the software is taken away, and with it, all your data.

Online platforms such as Social Media, Search Engines, and E-commerce platforms have also adopted the SaaS model, and with it, they have become the gatekeepers of the internet. They control what you see, what you can say, and what you can do. They have become the new censors of the internet, and they have the power to silence you, to shadowban you, and to de-platform you with little recourse.

To add insult to injury, the same SaaS companies started to use our own data to train their Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI. With this, the data that we generate and own is now being used against us to create new products and services that we have no control over. It is likely that many of those LLMs will directly compete with the companies that generated the data in the first place.

The case for software ownership

New technologies such as containerization, peer to peer protocols, blockchain, decentralized storage, and decentralized computing are now making it possible to own your software and data again. Software can be built with decentralised architectures that can bypass the cloud completelly, and data can be stored in a way that only the owner has access to it.

The case for software ownership is simple: it protects against censorship, it protects against rent-seeking, and it protects against dependency. By owning your software, you have the right to run it as you see fit, you have the right to access your data whenever you want, and you have the right to control how your data is used. Software ownership allows you to have the same level of sovereignty over your data as you have over your physical possessions.

The Manifesto

Software, Data, and the Cloud should be owned, not rented. This is a call to action to take back control of our software, our data, and the Internet. It is a call to build software that is owned by the people who use it, and data that is owned by the people who generate it. It is a call to build a new internet that is owned by everyone, and not by the companies that control it.

Rafael Gracioso Martins, Managing Partner at Outroll