> "Rewind the clock 20 years, there were all sorts of paid software offerings everywhere on the desktop. You couldn't uncompress a zip without paying (or stealing from) someone."
Windows XP had built in zip support and was released 20 years and 4 months ago. Before that, from memory pkunzip was free and it was zip which needed payment, but wikipedia links to a review of an early version from a BBS here http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip which states that it was free for noncommercial use, shareware license for commercial use, and that Phil Katz had helped people implement unzip (on deflate algorithm I think) in their own code without charging for his help.
You move onto talking about Steam (not open source) which is used as a DRM and payment engine for many closed source games - and that is one of the more popular uses of closed source software (as well as things like Microsoft Office), XBox, Playstation, Nintendo and PC gaming. Having proprietary Steam running a proprietary game after you login to Valve's proprietary online authentication, on a free reimplementation of proprietary Win32, but hooray because there's Linux somewhere inside, doesn't seem very close to the future Stallman was hoping for or the ideals of free software or open source. What would it mean to change the source of an online game? Probably that you can't connect to any servers anymore. What would it mean to move your FIFA team to another game engine?
The GDPR at least gives Europeans some rights to download their data from cloud services in a machine readable format, but strangely you don't seem to have that right to your data in a proprietary game stored on your local machine with access gated through a proprietary online service.
>> "Rewind the clock 20 years, there were all sorts of paid software offerings everywhere on the desktop. You couldn't uncompress a zip without paying (or stealing from) someone."
> Windows XP had built in zip support and was released 20 years and 4 months ago. Before that, from memory pkunzip was free and it was zip which needed payment, but wikipedia links to a review of an early version from a BBS here http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip which states that it was free for noncommercial use, shareware license for commercial use, and that Phil Katz had helped people implement unzip (on deflate algorithm I think) in their own code without charging for his help.
Free as in beer. Not FLOSS.
> You move onto talking about Steam (not open source) which is used as a DRM and payment engine for many closed source games - and that is one of the more popular uses of closed source software (as well as things like Microsoft Office), XBox, Playstation, Nintendo and PC gaming. Having proprietary Steam running a proprietary game after you login to Valve's proprietary online authentication, on a free reimplementation of proprietary Win32, but hooray because there's Linux somewhere inside, doesn't seem very close to the future Stallman was hoping for or the ideals of free software or open source. What would it mean to change the source of an online game? Probably that you can't connect to any servers anymore. What would it mean to move your FIFA team to another game engine?
Windows XP had built in zip support and was released 20 years and 4 months ago. Before that, from memory pkunzip was free and it was zip which needed payment, but wikipedia links to a review of an early version from a BBS here http://cd.textfiles.com/rbbsv3n1/pool/pkpolicy.zip which states that it was free for noncommercial use, shareware license for commercial use, and that Phil Katz had helped people implement unzip (on deflate algorithm I think) in their own code without charging for his help.
You move onto talking about Steam (not open source) which is used as a DRM and payment engine for many closed source games - and that is one of the more popular uses of closed source software (as well as things like Microsoft Office), XBox, Playstation, Nintendo and PC gaming. Having proprietary Steam running a proprietary game after you login to Valve's proprietary online authentication, on a free reimplementation of proprietary Win32, but hooray because there's Linux somewhere inside, doesn't seem very close to the future Stallman was hoping for or the ideals of free software or open source. What would it mean to change the source of an online game? Probably that you can't connect to any servers anymore. What would it mean to move your FIFA team to another game engine?
The GDPR at least gives Europeans some rights to download their data from cloud services in a machine readable format, but strangely you don't seem to have that right to your data in a proprietary game stored on your local machine with access gated through a proprietary online service.