Wyatt Walter on freedom of open source Software as a Service (SaaS)

May 12th, 2009 by vetterm

Wyatt Walter, one of DataSync’s network engineers, wrote an excellent post on why Software as a Service (SaaS) prevents vendor lock in and drives value:

By using open source software products on SaaS providers’ platforms who offer direct access to the code, one can avoid this lack of freedom as Stallman suggests, but also maintain the freedom from having to maintain one’s own servers.

Indeed, DataSync does offer code-level access to our PHP-driven applications, giving our customers full control over their code. Open source driven SaaS gives customers access to high availability systems and dedicated support personnel without the massive upfront and ongoing costs. If code-level access is given, they retain 100% control over their code. The downside? No sleepless nights troubleshooting servers. Before we made delivering great hosting our business, we were in the same boat. Then, we decided it didn’t have to be that way. That’s how the DataSync On-Demand idea was born. It just made sense.