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.