circuitfarmer

When will people stop supporting this clown?

Remember when some people were like “well, I don’t support him, but I’ve had this Twitter account forever, so I’m not leaving.” This is what happens. Things just get worse until you gain plausible deniability for continuing to support the bullshit.

Who saw this coming???

/s

This is the way

This result is predictable for a lot of different things that started as products and seem to be ending up as services.

Microsoft wants Windows to be a subscription service with the associated perks to the company (namely, targeted ads, and also extreme control over anything the system does, including this ad scheme), and so an increased number of people seek a more traditional OS.

The movie industry pushes streaming down everyone’s throat as a highly fragmented market where media ownership no longer exists; thus an increased number of people start to return to physical media.

Car companies push to paywall features of their cars behind subscription services. An increased number of people seek used cars which have no such paywalls.

The patterns are clear, in my view, but the C-suite is always driven by a naïve lust for ever-increasing profit.

I mean, the point of Debian is stability. If I’m running Debian then I’m not even gonna want to try and install the thing until after I’ve seen 100 people use it. I don’t think they’ll be looking for it in repos.

I’m not sure that’s actually true. I’m not a lawyer but I suspect it would take more than an internet comment saying “I did it.”

Also, the elephant in the remains in the room: discussing piracy is not piracy.

One thing to keep in mind that may be relevant: copies of non-digital things are different than digital copies.

Digital (meant here as bit-for-bit) copies are effectively impossible with analog media. If I copy a book (the whole book, its layout, etc., and not just the linguistic content), it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn’t true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.

If it sounds like an infinite money glitch on the digital side, that’s because it is. The only catch is that people have to own equipment to interpret the bits. Realistically, any form of digital media is just a record of how to set the bits on their own hardware.

Crucially: if people could resell those perfect digital copies, then there would be no market for the company which created it originally. It all comes down to the fact that companies no longer have to worry about generational differences between copies, and as a result, they’re already using this “infinite money glitch” and just paying for distribution. That market goes away if people can resell digital copies, because they can also just make new copies on their own.