You're arguing semantics. What most people are looking for is a "service bureau", and they use the word software to describe that. People don't want to manage their own infrastructure, and right now will happily pay for someone to take care of that for them.

Open source isn't wholly incompatible with this model, for sure - you can still have open source code that can be hosted by the developer for a fee. But the specific idea of throwing something up on the web and letting people use it if they want isn't as effective, because not having to worry about the software (including how it's hosted) is part of the draw of using third-party software in the first place.

I'm arguing semantics because I believe the semantics matter.

I feel very strongly that decentralized computation and software freedom are powerful forces for good. Conflating hosting and software plays to an agenda of curtailing individuals' and businesses' ability to self-host and to have freedom. I think this agenda is driven by hosting providers' profit motive primarly, but it plays into agendas of unrelated parties who seek to curtail freedom for their own ends.

The creation and maintenance of software is a service-- it always has been. Creating and maintaining software has never been a "product" because it doesn't suffer from scarcity. The best world I can envision is one where the underlying infrastructure, authorship, maintenance, and administration are all able to be decoupled based on need.

Well said. Ideas are not scarce, only the physical realm is. Its not hard to envision the coder being paid to code; when no more code is being written, there are no more checks coming in. Nobody is owed anything based on past accomplishments. In the information age, reputation is _everything_.

It's not semantics... It's a wholly different methodology. Software is software. Your idea of a 'service bureau' is a completely separate concept that can, in some cases, be attached to software but it's not a core concept of software itself.