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.