• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Limonene@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world#StopPayingGames
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    1 month ago

    When you buy software on a DVD, you own the software, at least until you install it and agree to the clickwrap agreement that revokes your ownership.

    In the olden days, we installed software by copying it off floppy disks onto our hard drives. There was no clickwrap agreement, because there was no installer. We owned that software.

    GOG advertises that purchasers own the software they buy. https://www.gog.com/en/news/welcome_to_gog

    Lots of open source software can be owned. You have to do something that grants you ownership in the first place, like buying it on a disc. Downloading it for free might or might not, I don’t know. But no FOSS license I know of has any clause that revokes ownership. The GPLv2 has a specific clause that says

    You are not required to accept this License

    so you can always choose to reject the whole GPL, and revert back to the implicit rules of commerce, “Pay money, receive thing” which confers ownership.









  • Limonene@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldGabe the GOAT Newell
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    3 months ago

    their anti-competitive practices

    Do you have any examples? For reference, Steam does allow developers to list games on Steam and other platforms, and even to have lower prices on the other platforms. I haven’t been able to find any true examples of anti-competitive practices by Steam.



  • I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, “it’s easy to work around that. You just have to…” and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.

    But even if it’s easy to do that, it’s not easy.

    1. You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there’s a different one for every problem.
    2. You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
    3. You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don’t want you to be able to remove their trash.
    4. You have to vet the tools, make sure they’re not malware. And continuously make sure it’s not replaced by malware in the future. There’s no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.