HACKER Q&A
📣 WheelsAtLarge

Where are the open source SaaS applications?


Where are the open source SaaS applications?


  👤 kentonv Accepted Answer ✓
I wrote about this 7 years ago. The SaaS model defeats most of the purpose of open source:

https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-re...

We need some easier way to self-host. But my attempt at that (sandstorm.io) didn't find product-market fit.


👤 abecedarius
https://sandstorm.io/ seems relevant.

👤 smoldesu
They're running locally. Stallman has a pretty good essay[0] on this, where he calls out SaaSS (Service As A Software Substitute) because the majority of SaaSes are perfectly capable of being self-hosted, operated peer-to-peer, or locally stored. Obviously that doesn't make money though, so people draft up a price and offer convenient liability to business users (like "Free Lifetime Support for just $999 more a month!"), which leads to the present shitshow that we're living in.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...


👤 caymanjim
What exactly do you mean? A huge number of hosted services are basically open source products that you could host yourself if you wanted to. Amazon RDS is just Postgres/MySQL/others; Amazon ElastiCache is just Redis/memcached; etc. That's how almost all of cloud computing works. You can run these yourself too. If this isn't what you mean, please add some clarity in the description.