http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January/000322.html

It’s on the GNU Project web site as well:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kragen-software.html

My concern at the time was that the *software* would be inaccessible if it was locked up inside a server, rather than with the information in it.
Last year, I wrote a draft of an essay discussing a related problem, entitled “the equivalent of free software for online services”:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-July/000818.html

This was in response to Jamie McCarthy’s Slashdot article, “Web Services and Open Source at OSCON”:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/1537213

Julian Cash has a project called “MoveMyData” to try to ameliorate the data problem a bit:

http://www.movemydata.org/

There was some discussion of my draft essay on okfn-discuss, in which Rufus Pollock and Francis Irving opined that the data was more important than the software:

http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2006-July/000122.html

And Mike Linksvayer wrote a good blog post along the same lines:

http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2006/07/06/constitutionally-open-services/

In response to Luis Villa’s post about “open source is doomed”:

http://tieguy.org/blog/2006/07/05/guadec-thoughts-2-client-development-platforms-and-the-web/

In summary, we need a better alternative than “set up Drupal on your own web server” to solve this problem. As long as it’s a battle between traditional isolated desktop apps (which may be free software) and provider-hosted web apps (which aren’t free software in any practical way), the web apps will keep winning.

As demand for services grows, so there will be people offering data translation services and data transfer services. Savvy users will make sure they only work with sites offering them the chance to download (and thus backup) their data in a standard format.

The reason that Open Source matters is that it encourages competition in the marketplace — low barrier to entry, anyone can make an eBay or a blogspot. Once you have genuine competition then you get a lot of new ideas into the mix and the popular sites have no choice but to satisfy consumer demand if they want to stay popular.