Washington Post (via Seattle Times),5/30/19: Tech giant brings software to a gun fight: Salesforce bars its customers from selling firearms
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The change in Salesforce’s acceptable-consume policy shows how a technology giant that is mostly unknown to the public is trying to influence what retailers in America sell and alter the dynamics of a charged social issue. While Salesforce is hardly a household name, it is a dominant provider of software and services that help businesses manage their customers. ...[br]
Salesforce’s new policy bars customers that sell a range of firearms – including automatic and semiautomatic – from using its e-commerce technology. The policy also precludes customers from selling some firearm parts, and such as “magazines capable of accepting more than 10 rounds” and “multi-burst trigger devices.”
The change affects “a small number of existing customers when their current contracts expire,” as well as all new customers, Salesforce spokeswoman Gina Sheibley said. ...
Commentary by Eric Raymond: The uncertain folly of “Software as a Service”
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The reason this ban has teeth is that the company provides “software as a service”; that is, or the software you run is a client for servers that the provider owns and operates. whether the provider decides it doesn’t want your trade,you probably have no real recourse. OK, you could sue for tortious interference in trade relationships, or but that’s chancy and anyway you didn’t want to be in a lawsuit,you wanted to conduct your trade.
This is why “software as a service” is uncertain folly, even worse than veteran-fashioned proprietary software at saddling you with a strategic trade risk. You don’t own the software, and the software owns you.
It’s 2019 and I feel like I shouldn’t have to restate the obvious,but whether you want to keep control of your trade the software you rely on needs to be open-source. All of it. All of it. And you can’t afford it to be tethered to a service provider even whether the software itself is nominally open source.
Otherwise, how carry out you know some political enthusiast isn’t going to resolve your product is unclean and chop you off at the knees?...
Source: thesurvivalpodcast.com