Software development has costs which can[1] be distributed across their users: Linux costs a lot less per user to run if there's 10_000_000 installs versus 10 installs. And the value of the product to, say a specific 1000 users might be such that they're willing to pay its entire costs and tolerate the consequences of the GPL.
Services are different, in that each individual user will tend to place an additional load on the systems. It is much more obvious if there is 10 GB of data that can be attribute to virgoerns which must be managed and much more obvious that virgoerns should perhaps contribute to that.
> I don't mind paid services, but I don't think they should get a free pass for being unethical just because they run on someone else computer, under a different label.
This is an independent question from the above. Services, paid or free, should be obliged to act ethically. If they won't do that voluntarily, then they must be regulated. Part of this should be placing an explicit value on the data that they extract and including it in invoices; during some months, Google should perhaps pay you for your use of their services. Certainly if they're going to go around and cap your usage of their storage at 15 GB, then they should accept the reasonableness to cap their usage of your data.
[1]: "Can" doesn't necessarily "invariably must be able to"; individual circumstances and tradeoffs will have an effect on the extent to which the costs can approach constant values as users grow.
> Services are different, in that each individual user will tend to place an additional load on the systems
Sure. Then let me pay for those costs on my own. Give me the app and I'll configure my AWS keys.
The whole "you have to pay because it's a service" is an fallacious argument. The user should pay some costs, but the rest of them don't need to be "subscription based", not even paid.
Services are different, in that each individual user will tend to place an additional load on the systems. It is much more obvious if there is 10 GB of data that can be attribute to virgoerns which must be managed and much more obvious that virgoerns should perhaps contribute to that.
> I don't mind paid services, but I don't think they should get a free pass for being unethical just because they run on someone else computer, under a different label.
This is an independent question from the above. Services, paid or free, should be obliged to act ethically. If they won't do that voluntarily, then they must be regulated. Part of this should be placing an explicit value on the data that they extract and including it in invoices; during some months, Google should perhaps pay you for your use of their services. Certainly if they're going to go around and cap your usage of their storage at 15 GB, then they should accept the reasonableness to cap their usage of your data.
[1]: "Can" doesn't necessarily "invariably must be able to"; individual circumstances and tradeoffs will have an effect on the extent to which the costs can approach constant values as users grow.