In recent years, the "software as a service" model has been picking up speed. Many users and organizations are moving to this model and giving up on owning and maintaining their own servers and software in favor of using a service provided by a third party.

This trend poses new challenges to the open source movement - while most software as a service providers use and contribute to open source, a large part of the software which is the base for their services is proprietary, or the service can not be run using open source. Additionally, open source software products are sometimes released when a significant portion of their functionality is based on a complementary proprietary service - for example, Android.

This situation challenges the open source software movement and raises questions about the definition of open source.