Cheaters will still find a way. As with any type of blanket restrictions, it only ends up being the honest, paying customers who get punished. The actual cheaters, pirates, etc. will always still find a way to do what they do.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: melkemindBut at the end of the day, you can't look at corporations as people with good or evil motives because they have neither. The only motive is profit.

For the purpose of judging motivations, you should look at corporations as the people who own and lead them. They're the ones with agency. A corporation is just an abstract concept.

The fact that these people are more or less expected to seek profit without concern for ethics (at least as far as they can get away with) is irrelevant. If an action would be unethical for a person, it's unethical for a corporation.

True, but my conversation wasn't about current actions, it was about motivations for possible future actions. It was speculation about what Microsoft will do. You could argue that you can predict future actions based on past actions, but the people running the company aren't the same people who ran it back when they were clearly attacking Linux. My argument isn't that they're good now. It's just that we don't know what they're going to do. Microsoft did a fine job of spreading FUD back in the day. I don't see any reason why we need to do the same now. They are not our teachers.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismThe saying comes to mind

"When people show you who they really are, believe them the first time."

I mean, I'm with you 100% on that. The thing is, no matter how much the US government wants to say otherwise, corporations aren't people. Microsoft is not a person. It's a public corporation that functions with one motive: profit. Now you can argue against the very concept of capitalism. I myself am very much opposed to it, as was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and pretty much anyone else who cared about human rights. But at the end of the day, you can't look at corporations as people with good or evil motives because they have neither. The only motive is profit.

Sometimes that works in our favor. Sometimes it doesn't. Right now, Microsoft's profit motive is not antagonistic to free and open source software. That could certain change in the future. I was just speaking of the present situation.

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Quoting: ElectricPrism

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThe major way Wine differs from Yuzu is that Wine does not circumvent technological protection measures.

I 100% agree with you it __SHOULD__ but the world we live in "money talks, bullshit walks".

Assuming this is this American legal system we are talking about, I'm not particularly confident that a jury of "average peers" or citizens have the technical intellectual framework necessary to understand the difference between Wine & Emulation.

The name wine even is a bit of a acknowledgement of this conflation -- W.ine I.s N.ot a E.mulator.

I would love to be optimistic, but considering the levels* of idiocracy and incompetence in the modern age, I can't help but consider this to be a very real and serious possibility.

I can't see the slope any other way than slippery if they succeed.

(Final thoughts, most people don't know the difference between a JPEG and a GIF, we can't even get past annunciation.)

At least for the moment, Microsoft's Xbox division is interested in selling games and game services (GamePass). They have no interest in restricting games to the Windows ecosystem. That's why their games are on Steam. If they wanted to be petty, they could just only sell their games in the Windows Store. They aren't even restricting their first-party console games to Xbox.

If Proton means more people will play their games, I think they're all for it. In fact, I don't think Microsoft even wants to be in the OS business anymore. It's not their big money maker. Restricting games just doesn't benefit them financially.

So, yes, it's a possibility as much as anything is a possibility. But is it "very real and serious?" I doubt it. Not for now, at least.

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Quoting: LordDaveTheKindI rarely used it. Can it work as well as Sunshine does (i.e. with hardware encoding too)?

I've never been able to get Sunshine to work, so at least on my setup, it worked 100% better. :grin:

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It is important to understand that most companies signed onto an international agreement when the DMCA was passed. This isn't just an American thing. As a librarian, I remember when the DMCA first passed. We pretty much considered it the death of preservation as we then knew it. It's quite possible future generations will look back on our civilizations and find nothing of intellectual value because it's all locked behind outdated, non-functional DRM.

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It's nice that they'll install so many different distros for you even though you'll probably inevitably install several different ones on your own. Yes, I'm talking to you. You know who you are. :grin:

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I have the original DRM-free game one of my old hard drives somewhere. I think it's perfectly fine for a game like this, as long as it doesn't have anything that would prevent it from working in the future if the developer disappears.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: melkemind

Quoting: LinasThis time-limited licensing is such bullshit. Basically building a self-destruct timer into the product.

Copyright, patents, etc. are generally misused nowadays. They were intended for individual creators to get compensation and credit for their work, not for corporations to hoard, exploit and fatten their portfolios.

While I agree that should describe the world, I'm not sure it actually does. Whatever nice sounding rhetoric has been said, either now or at the time the laws were first being defined, benefits for publishers were a big, and perhaps the biggest, part of the mix from the very beginning.

You can take a quick look at the history of publishing and see what you're saying is wrong. Most copyright was held by authors and artists for much of the early history of the law. As far as patents go, we know who early inventors were because their names were on the patents, not the names of corporations. The idea of corporations as "persons" is a relatively new concept.

Companies like Disney had to fight to get copyright extended for their own benefit, but the law didn't begin the way it is now. Furthermore, a lot of people don't realize how many rights they lost when the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) went into effect. That was a law designed primarily to benefit corporate, capitalist interests, but it's only 25 years old.

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Quoting: LinasThis time-limited licensing is such bullshit. Basically building a self-destruct timer into the product.

Copyright, patents, etc. are generally misused nowadays. They were intended for individual creators to get compensation and credit for their work, not for corporations to hoard, exploit and fatten their portfolios.

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