So you thought you bought some software
At the heart of the computer industry are some very big lies, and some of them are especially iniquitous. One is about commercial software.
[...] Anyone who chooses to use free and open source software on their desktop regularly gets asked why. Why bother? Isn't it more work? Isn't the pro-grade gear commercial? Isn't it worth buying the good stuff? Windows is the industry standard, isn't it simply less work to go with the flow?
[...] The practical upshot of which is that most of the time, the commercial stuff isn't significantly better. No, it isn't less hassle. Mostly, it's more hassle, but if you're used to the nuisances you don't notice them. If the free software experience was really worse, most of us wouldn't do it.
[...] Anyone who chooses to use free and open source software on their desktop regularly gets asked why. Why bother? Isn't it more work? Isn't the pro-grade gear commercial? Isn't it worth buying the good stuff? Windows is the industry standard, isn't it simply less work to go with the flow?
[...] The reason that it's not better to buy software is simple, but it's a lie. A lie at the heart of the entire computer industry, but nonetheless a lie that's very hard to see – "for the same reason that people in Trafalgar Square can't see England," to quote a good book.
It isn't better to buy commercial software because you can't buy software.
It is not possible for you to own paid-for, commercial software. You can't buy it. You probably think that you have bought lots, but you haven't. All you really bought is a lie.
[...] All you can buy is licenses. Serial numbers or activation keys or maybe even hardware dongles. Strange abstract entities that only really exist in lawyers' minds, which claim to permit you to use someone else's software.
As someone who started installing gcc in the 80's, I use more open source packages than closed source. The only "bugs" they have tend to be compatibility issues. As in, $GiantCorp releases a new version of $PopularProgram and suddenly the Open Source version can't open the new save files.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday October 06 2022, @06:03AM (17 children)
Before landing permanently by Linux, I oscillates every couple of years between Windows (with commercial apps) and Linux (with OSS apps). Each transition was painful, because things are different from what you're used to.
Not worse, just different.
One thing has changed over time. It used to he that commercial software came with extensive documentation. Nowadays it's just as bad as the OSS documentation.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @07:56AM
What documentation? Beyond 'insert disk' or 'click this link to download, here is the code'.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:01AM (14 children)
I find windows GUI is more stable than linux.
* Every few days I have some issues with cinnamon (some linux mint thing which I don't understand very well) going bonkers and not rendering the desktop properly.
* Firefox wants to reinstall every week, which in itself is painful; and when it does reinstall it often goes into some weird mode where it uses loads of system resources (and takes thunderbird down with it).
* Libreoffice crashes every now and then, especially when it tries to render powerpoint. Sometimes even rendering libreoffice generated docs. It also struggles with slides that have lots of objects on.
I can usually fix these sorts of things by power cycling and/or mysterious incantations in the terminal to kill/restart processes etc.
I don't see any of these issues with windows - on the other hand I tend to use windows for non-work stuff i.e. video games which are possibly not so demanding, and I don't tend to leave my windows boxes running.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:19AM (1 child)
I use Windows at work for a living. I have lots of issues. Windows is great if you don't do much, or don't strain it. It's really not a suitable operating system for heavy duty use. Windows crashes on me at least once a week, mostly due to how crappy the window system is.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 06 2022, @07:24PM
Windows is okay if YOU are not responsible for maintaining it. If your organization spends obscene amounts of money keeping Windows running smoothly, safely and securely. And throwing plenty of hardware at it to have satisfactory performance.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:59AM (1 child)
The UI is relatively stable(*cough Win 11 cough*), but whoever's been writing their security patches has gotten very sloppy. I'm currently battling yet another Windows Update corruption that isn't getting repaired with the usual tools. If it isn't that, the updates are flat out broken, pushed too quickly, then retracted so they can do it right. On Linux you can blame the fragmentation, but Microsoft doesn't have that excuse.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday October 06 2022, @10:00AM
Exactly this. As someone else said, the Linux desktop has stability problems. Windows has other problems, often related to the registry or the updates.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday October 06 2022, @01:38PM (5 children)
I cannot confirm your first two points. I am on openSUSE/KDE and the GUI is absolutely stable for years (no crashes/lockups). If firefox wants to re-install, use a better distro which has turned off the online-checks of firefox and relies on own repos. WRT Libreffice I have to concur. In my perception, word processing is an unsolvable problem. In all processors (LO/MS word/google docs) I have seen horribly garbled text formatting on single character changes (like removing a new-line) in recent versions. LO seems to be the worst, however. Just the other week, I had it edit two characters away from the actual text cursor and undo eating away my text (using track-changes). I wonder how it is even possible to produce code to this effect.
For presentations, I recommend using pdf (latex) or HTML (much better effects).
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Thursday October 06 2022, @03:09PM
Firefox often wants to update, but that's because there's a new version every month (even with the ESRs) - partly because of security vulnerabilities like https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2022-41/ [mozilla.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by EEMac on Thursday October 06 2022, @03:29PM (1 child)
> word processing is an unsolvable problem
Only because Word compatibility is required. That requires Word's multiple-level overlapping character/paragraph/page style model, which overlaps "somehow" with the visible style (heading 1, heading 2, . . .), which overlaps "somehow" with the text-styling controls (bold, underline, . . . ). It's learnable but complicated. I can only imagine what LibreOffice programmers go through trying to match Word's behavior - and bugs, since that's part of compatibility.
WordPerfect, for example, is famous for getting documents right repeatedly. And with Reveal Codes you can actually see/fix the underlying structure. Or, as shrewdsheep mentions, HTML lets you (mostly) separate content from presentation. That solves a whole host of problems.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday October 06 2022, @05:35PM
Agreed. I cant say I've ever had an problem using OpenOffice to open OpenDocument files, or any other supported file formats for that matter. Nor even with Word files created by Open Office or other open source word processing programs.
Word files are just a disaster - even Microsoft was either unable or unwilling to fully document the format when creating their current "open" formats. Instead, despite (as I dimly recall) the format specification being ~10x the size of the ODF specs, they still only define large stretches of the format as literally just "the way Word does it", while resorting to bribery and coercion to get it accepted as an "open" format by those governments that decided to require open formats for government files.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday October 07 2022, @02:33AM
Oh, LO does even more interesting things with RTF documents...
-- When Track Changes encounters one of the RTF tag nesting bugs (as can happen if italics comes to the very end of a line and includes the punctuation), it proceeds to mis-nest the whole rest of the document so you get 500 pages of italics, or strikeout, or both, and you can't fix it from inside LO; if you try you just wind up with all subsequent text hidden. You have to fix it in a text editor, assuming you know how to find the overlapped tags and delete them. (I have become proficient at this.)
-- When Track Changes encounters an image used as a scene spacer, sometimes it proceeds to insert ~550MB (yes, megabytes) of invisible UUEncoded garbage. (It's not even document data, it's just junk, possibly grabbed from RAM.) Same fix, if you can find an editor to handle it. If you copypasta around the point of error, it'll lose the tracked changes, having somewhere in the mess dropped the close tag for something upstream.
These problems don't occur in DOCX or ODT files... but if you trust either as your save format, you have a death wish. I have a client who lost a whole finished novel to header corruption in the ZIP file those formats are on disk (unfortunately by the time it was discovered, it had propagated across her backups too... Nope, the ZIP wouldn't rebuild either.)
" I have seen horribly garbled text formatting on single character changes (like removing a new-line) "
That's probably a tag nesting bug -- it's not properly preserving formatting tags when you delete visible text, so they wind up miswhacked, and formatting gets mangled.
BTW this is exactly why Internet Explorer ignored missing tags, back in the early days -- because until the XP release, when this was fixed, Frontpage had a tag deleting bug that had the same effect. (Backspace over the WYSIWYG text, and it took out any tags in its way too, as if it was editing raw text.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday October 08 2022, @02:17AM
BTW I also greatly prefer KDE, and... it depends.
PCLinuxOS/KDE runs perfectly stable for months even in heavy use, and about the only way to clog it up is when Chrome dies of tab overload, and takes memory management with it. Even that happens very rarely (probably because 24GB RAM).
Fedora/KDE needs to be restarted about once a week even if it was just sleeping. (It also tends to get sluggish toward the end of the stable period, which PCLOS never does.) If I forget, I will soon be reminded because first sign is Chrome's bookmarks are misaligned and don't work. (This'un has 64GB RAM, so it's not starving.)
When they fail, they both do it the same way. GUI becomes unresponsive, but terminal still works. It looks very much like Windows being run out of resource heaps.
I've had Mageia lock up, but might have been a Wayland problem. And I had Neon forget its password on the 2nd boot after a clean install. Conversely Manjaro/KDE on my Pinephone has never misbehaved.
But outside of distro-specific quirks... KDE itself misbehaves so rarely that the bugfix list is funny, because I never saw any of them.
Chrome will sometimes whine that it needs to be reinstalled. This is just boilerplate for "I want an update!!" and has nothing to do with the OS. I imagine Firefox is doing the same thing.
Disclaimer: I am typing this on an everyday WinXP system that was last restarted 09 October 2021. Yeah, I like stability.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @04:38PM
Oh we're doing anecdotes? Ok here's mine. I've been using linux on the desktop exclusively for two decades. The only GUI crashes I've ever had were related to AMD drivers, which has been a challenge on Windows as well. LibreOffice is literally rock solid it has never crashed once for me. Not ONE time. Firefox has never tried to "reinstall itself." Sounds like you either have a hardware issue or have managed to screw up your installation somehow. Those are extremely odd problems that 99% of us do not experience.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday October 07 2022, @03:25AM (1 child)
Sounds like more of a Cinnamon problem; this is why I use XFCE, which is just functional and stays out of my way.
I don't need some UX twerp completely replacing the general user experience every 5 years with some new, sexy-looking piece of vomit that destroys my productivity and forces me to relearn how to use my OS.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday October 07 2022, @07:32AM
I am not really interested in Desktop UI, so I just wanted something that wasn't a mobile phone OS (i.e. not ubuntu). Maybe I chose the wrong car keys from the jar.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday October 08 2022, @02:52AM
I can't be sure, but I suspect some of these are graphics driver issues. One way to be sure would be to run something like a frame-buffer-only X server and view it on another system, as it then wouldn't be graphics-hardware specific, or to be able to preserve window structure and application data when fully restarting the X server.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday October 06 2022, @04:22PM
I'm going through that now. Used Linux off and on, always dual-boot, since Mandrake. I hadn't even booted to the Kubuntu side in years when the hard drive went out quite a while ago, so not wanting to get inside the computer I just replaced it. Then Microsoft trashed Audacity's ability to play or record, so I bought a new drive for the formerly dual-boot computer and installed Linux. I'll have an "ask S/N" journal shortly.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 5, Touché) by Ingar on Thursday October 06 2022, @11:24AM (6 children)
... you actually own the license.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday October 06 2022, @04:38PM (5 children)
A license is merely a contract. Copyright law treats computer programs like books and music, which is where the license comes in. When you buy a novel, you're only buying the paper and ink, not the novel. However, copyright isn't about copying, it's about publishing.
Software needs a license because copying that book or record is completely legal, has never been outlawed in the US, and in fact the Home Recording Act of 1978 specifically legalizes copying, or the Betamax would have been illegal; the MAFIAA took Sony to court and lost.
I'm no lawyer, but I don't see how a shrink wrap license is even legal. If you want me to enter into a contract, give me paper to sign BEFORE you take my money!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday October 06 2022, @07:29PM (4 children)
My understanding is that a License means Permission. NOT a contract. Now there may be a contract in order to get a License as part of the consideration of that contract.
The word license means permission.
Dog license
Fishing license
Marriage license (why don't these expire if you don't renew them? Like a dog license.)
Hunting license
Gun licenseDriver license
License to kill
Is God's grace a license to sin? etc
It makes sense that the word License is conflated with a Contract because they so often are twisted together like a candy cane. But you can be given a license without a contract or consideration. And you can have a contract that involves no license.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 07 2022, @02:38AM
My nutshell definition: a "license" is limited permission (that is, temporary immunity from prosecution) to possess or perform what would otherwise be illegal.
Funny list. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 11 2022, @05:40PM (2 children)
Yes, the word license means permission. As far as a software license is concerned, no license is needed unless you have signed a contract agreeing to the terms of that license. Copyright law doesn't say I can't copy that program, it says I can't PUBLISH it. It's legal to copy that CD unless it's copy-protected (DMCA) and give it away, but not sell it or put it on the internet, that's publishing.
If I go to Best Buy or Walmart and buy boxed software, there is no contract, thus no license. They will attempt to tell you that you need permission to use what you just paid for, but it's no more true than the FBI warnings on VCR tapes that claimed copying was a felony with prison time, when no law had been passed outlawing copying. No law has been passed outlawing their lies, either, as the 1st amendment prohibits such a law.
Now, downloaded music, games, software, etc. is a different story. Good luck getting a copy without clicking "I agree".
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 12 2022, @02:46PM (1 child)
For software, a license is required by law, or you are violating Copyright law. The software is copyrighted. Someone owns that copyright. You have no rights to use it without a copyright license. Sometimes, such a license is free. Sometimes you have to pay for a license with an implied or expressly written contract.
A copyright license is your defense against a lawsuit that you are violating copyright by using the software. YOU are the one who waves the license in court saying I have a license from the copyright owner. (Contract or no is irrelevant how you got the license.)
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 12 2022, @03:38PM
You're speaking from ignorance. Copyright is not about copying any more than Right To Work laws give you a right to work. Copyright is about publishing, not copying, and in fact although recording songs from the radio was never outlawed (this is America, where what isn't forbidden is legal, unlike Russia, where nothing not specifically legalized is legal), they passed the Home Recording Act. Were it not for that act, the MPAA would have killed the Betamax in its infancy and there would have been no VCRs.
Now, the DMCA says that if a work is "copy protected" it's illegal to copy it. How would you "copy-protect" a piece of software whose only purpose is to be installed on a computer? You can't. Hence, the contract.
But there were contracts even before the DMCA, just because copyright doesn't stop you from copying, just publishing, so the only way to get a copy of that program was to sign a contract. A paper contract with an ink signature, since electronic signatures didn't exist. It continued past the mainframe era into the PC era, where the toothless "shrink wrap contract" was born. That contract is not valid, and you can't point to a single court case where one was upheld. It's only widespread ignorance that gives that "contract" any force at all.
I registered my first copyright in 1983, for software that ran on hardware that hasn't existed for decades, but its copyright is in force until 95 years after I die. Before the Bono Act (AKA "Steamboat Willie Preservation Act") that copyright would have expired 19 years ago. That law badly needs to be repealed.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 06 2022, @12:45PM (4 children)
There was a time, back in the 1990s for sure, when free and open source software was mostly inferior to the commercially available stuff. You remember: back in the day when Windows was so trivial to copy that only businesses afraid of lawsuits paid for licenses...
Even today, while some 3D CAD software exists as FOSS, I don't think any objective comparison with the commercial stuff would say it's as good or useful.
In software development I have kept tabs on Visual Studio vs Qt Creator IDEs since the mid 2000s. 2005: Qt Creator didn't exist, I think Eclipse was around- but that's another kettle of fish. 2009, Qt Creator releases - not quite as good as Visual Studio, particularly in the debugger department, but it's usable and I start using it instead of Visual Studio / whatever Apple called their IDE at the time. In the early 2010s Qt Creator made great strides and soon was "better" than the Visual Studio experience, at least for development of Qt code (as I guess you might expect), but it was making VS look bad in several areas, and debugger support in Creator was improving too (though it never quite caught up with Studio, IMO). Then around 2013 Microsoft made significant improvements to Visual Studio, and also started licensing free versions for students / hobbyists. This licensing thing actually makes Studio marginally worse, since you have to sort all the license issues / decisions - which really are just overhead on what you're actually trying to accomplish. Around the similar timeframe, Microsoft bought Nokia - and Qt along with it - coincidence? Anyway, the formerly LGPL only Nokia owned Qt went back to their schizophrenic Open/Commercial licensing, and has been going downhill with that ever since, but Creator remains a great IDE if you're developing Qt apps, and LGPL remains a viable option as long as you can navigate the system to reach it and avoid the commercial components of Qt along the way.
Bottom line, whether it's Qt or any other software package, FOSS vs commercial comes down to this for me: FOSS, determine that the license is acceptable, done. No payments is the small part, no recurring maintenance of renewing license issues is the big one. My colleagues that use non-FOSS in their toolkits are regularly talking about license issue this, key for that, negotiating a group deal with other departments, etc. Microsoft has made it super easy for our corporation to pay the developer's license of some thousands of dollars per developer per year - that one covers a lot and we don't think about it below the manager level (except for having to remember the process of how to get our developer keys, getting those keys, inputting those keys into our dev tools, working out how to transition to "real" keys for production), but all the picky little add-ons that aren't covered under the M$ umbrella do end up costing even more than the M$ license in terms of brain cycles / man hours spent dealing with the licensing issues. Even if it's $2000 per year, the M$ license is cheaper because it takes up less of our time. Once in a blue moon, corporate gets nervous and asks for a BOM of FOSS in our products, so we maintain that, ship a copy to legal when they ask, and based on the lack of questions we get back I suspect they just file it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday October 06 2022, @04:47PM (3 children)
The Ernie Ball company makes, IMO, the very best guitar strings. Sterling Ball, its CEO, would disagree with you. [cnet.com]
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 06 2022, @08:48PM (2 children)
Maybe I was confusing, here it sounds like he is exactly agreeing with me:
I was trying to say: M$ makes it easy to give money to them, much easier than the smaller software for sale outfits. Not that M$ aren't a bunch of assholes who try to make a buck any way they can, not at all.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 11 2022, @05:27PM (1 child)
The article I linked is well over a decade old. Graphics? GIMP. There's one on the Linux computer I haven't tried called Krita. Not sure what kind of design software he was wishing for, CAD matbe? I'm pretty sure I've seen open source CAD software in the last decade.
The universities are pushing this Microsoft propaganda, and doing a damned good job of it. My 35 year old daughter was brought up on freeware, shareware, and open source (along with some proprietary) and went back to college recently, and they have convinced her that "you have to have a special kind of brain" to use open source, it's "too hard" for most people. I have seen no proof or explanation for this belief, although it seems to me that GIMP is only hard to use if you're used to Photoshop, Libre Office is only hard to use if you're used to MS Office. Yes, no decent PowerPoint alternative, but I consider that a plus. PowerPoint is a useless waste of time to develop and watch.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 11 2022, @06:53PM
Have you used CAD software? Professionally? In 2003 I was daily driving AutoCad 14 and Inventor, and there was nothing like it in open source. There have been a few things come along, maaaybe up to the level of utility found in AutoCad 14, but the 3D design stuff I have found in OpenSource is nothing like the 3D mechanical stuff used in design and manufacturing. I mean, there's Blender, but that's a whole different animal from SolidWorks. And when I do 3D design for my hobby printer I use OpenSCAD, but that's like building a lean-to out of branches compared with the steel-and-glass skyscraper stuff in the commercial 3D packages.
Microsoft learned the schools trick from Apple, and Apple is still a strong presence in our local high schools.
I agree: LibreOffice is on-par with or better than Microsoft office, has been since 2003. I used Photoshop instead of GIMP in 2003, but switched to GIMP by 2006 and it was good enough that I never looked back. Tried to get my son to use Krita for illustration, it looks pretty good (GIMP is definitely NOT a drawing software), I'm not even sure what the Windows equivalent of Krita would be - maybe Adobe Illustrator? And I think LibreOffice Impress is every bit as useful as PowerPoint or whatever the Mac equivalent is, for the same reasons you give... Unfortunately, if you make a slide deck in Impress, it won't import to PowerPoint well, if at all, so when your colleague needs you to provide 3 slides to fill 2 minutes of their snoozefest, it's not really a viable alternative, because even if your colleague loves Impress over PowerPoint, they're going to be getting slides from a bunch of your Uni graduates who "just can't be expected learn another software."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday October 06 2022, @02:05PM (5 children)
There wasn't anything in the article that I didn't already know. But it's a great place to point someone else to who both doesn't understand licensing vs. ownership and open source vs. commercial. (If they don't mind doing the LONG read to get to understand the issues).
At home I'm using Windows (there's always at least one program that I'm using that doesn't run on Wine, which has varied over the years). But I run LibreOffice and use Thunderbird, intentionally.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Touché) by isostatic on Thursday October 06 2022, @03:05PM (3 children)
This feels like an argument from the days nerds were nerds and stuff mattered.
People don't buy software now, they rent it -- office for $10 a month, a pdf reader for $57 a month, web browser and email for your personal data, etc.
It's less hassle for the average person to rent software than to license it in the "buy it" way it used to work.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday October 06 2022, @04:49PM
Considering that I have a lot of eight and sixteen bit software that won't run on a modern computer, there's not a lot of difference.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday October 07 2022, @07:17AM (1 child)
People pay $57/month for a PDF reader? You have to be joking! (You are joking, aren't you. Aren't you?)
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday October 07 2022, @07:21AM
Sorry, that also includes photoshop etc.
Just for acrobat it's about $20 a month, or $240 a year
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/pricing.html [adobe.com]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 07 2022, @02:44AM
I gave up even trying to get WINE to behave, or run at all--!! and now when I need a WinApp on Linux, I install WinXP in a VM and use that. Life is much easier that way. I can have WinAmp and my RTF editor (why is there no real native RTF editor for linux??) on my nice linux desktop, and not have to fight with some cranky not-an-emulator.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday October 06 2022, @04:04PM (3 children)
I have been left scrambling more than once when a commercial software product I depend on tried to extort more money from me, or simply disappeared.
Same thing for open source software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2022, @05:38PM (2 children)
There is a pretty strong motivation for software you pay for to NOT change things on a whim
People are constantly trying to be the alpha person in the FOSS world by breaking compatibility because they can
with the pointless retort of 'if you don't like it, fork off'
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday October 06 2022, @05:57PM (1 child)
At some point in the lifecycle of a software product, the authors disappear. Maybe they die. Maybe they retire. Maybe they lose interest. Maybe future revenues don't justify the cost of continued to support. Maybe they are trying to push customers to the new hotness. Maybe they get acquired by another company. Maybe they go bankrupt. There are many reasons, but bit rot comes for all software eventually. In my own experience, most software users are heavily reliant on the strategy: "Before this software that I depend on rots, I will have already moved on."
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 07 2022, @02:47AM
Yeah, I've been trawling distros again, for the day when my beloved one-man-band-distro dies.
Things disappear, and either we've already found another solution (which doesn't exactly encourage the old one to live on) or we're left hanging.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday October 07 2022, @01:09AM (2 children)
During my 61 years of life and 47 years of computer experience, I never ever bought any software. Yes, I might've paid for some when buying hardware, but never explicitly software. So far free served me well.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday October 07 2022, @01:13AM (1 child)
At some point Bill Gates promised hardware would be free. I actually hoped, but the motherfucker lied.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Friday October 07 2022, @07:26AM
Some hardware is close to costless, software too, but you pay for it with data.