Sidenote: I wish I could do more to encourage friends on the internet to use Mastodon and Lemmy...
seaturtle
joined 2 years ago
I've seen stuff like ArcGIS on torrent sites the last time I checked. Dunno about Mnova.
Sidenote: their licenses are crazy complicated. I really wish there were just FOSS alternatives to everything. I know there's QGIS/GRASS GIS for ArcGIS, R for S (or is it the other way around? I forgot), MuseScore for Sibelius/Finale/etc., and so on. And also LibreOffice for MS Office of course. But I think some academic/professional software is just so niche and/or has institutional players (like companies, governments, and universities) that are so committed to it that it can be hard to get people to change.
I really wish GOG made Galaxy for Linux already.
They can revoke stuff from your library.
They just usually don't have a reason to do so.
(Also, you might not be able to get older versions of the game anymore. Meaning that you may be stuck with unwanted content changes in some games.)
So thanks to not having signed in for a couple months, I actually still had notifications from the last time I chatted about this, and here's the information someone else found when they looked into it.
https://leminal.space/comment/2351525 (see this excerpted comment chain)
In summary, this "policy" is at best someone (maybe even GabeN) stating back in 2009 and 2013 that games will still be (somehow) made available to customers if Steam shuts down.
As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), there's nothing in the Steam Subscriber Agreement that obligates Steam/Valve to do it. And even if there were, there's nothing saying they can't just update the SSA to remove such a term.
Furthermore, even if Valve wants to do this if Steam ever shuts down, considering Steam's size I'd say it's less likely to be shut down and more likely to just get sold off if Valve ever does become insolvent, and the new owner of Steam can't be held to this promise anyway.
So, while it'd definitely be good if this were the case, this seems to be more wishful than written-in-stone.
And there's also kids who don't have credit cards yet too.
Do you happen to know how well this works for old Windows games? We're talking about random indie things that run in little windows and are native to like Win98. A good lotta old doujin games are like this.
This was the case for me, to some extent, for some time. But then, the more I used of Steam, the more I realized there are a variety of issues, ranging from minor inconveniences like having to deal with the Steam client (and its interface and footprint) to being at risk of losing access to all of my Steam games due to losing access to the account for a variety of possible reasons (some of which could happen even if I didn't do anything wrong on my end).
These days, if I buy, I buy DRM-free. That's an arrangement where publishers/developers properly respect customers. If it's not available DRM-free, it's ethically justifiable to pirate.
I can agree that Valve has done some good things, such as making digital distribution go big, making indie games viable, and doing a lot to advance gaming on Linux.
But I'd also argue that that doesn't obligate me to spend money to patronize them, particularly when I can get a better (by virtue of being DRM-free) product elsewhere.
Fundamentally I don't really know how it'd be viable to truly "own" a specific copy of something, when it's always possible to make infinitely many copies of it. Any such "ownership" is at best essentially just conceptual, aside from perhaps the legal right to annoy other people about the copies they are in possession of.
So instead my personal take is that I'd rather everything just be offered DRM-free. I don't necessarily need transferable ownership as much as I just need proper and guaranteed access under my own control after I purchase the product.
Sidenote: I tried getting something off APKPure the other day and it only came in the form of XAPK files. Do you know how to get the APK out of them? (A cursory check suggests that XAPK might be a proprietary thing made by APKPure that only works with their own APKPure app, which feels pretty dirty to me...)
But anything that exists as digital data can be copied. The same applies to NFTs. Make an NFT image or game or whatever, and it can be copied by whoever has access to it. The only way to prevent such copying is to not release it at all.
The only stipulation is that copies made without authorization of whoever holds the rights to it would not be "official" instances of the thing, and there are potential copyright restrictions on the use of such copies...but that's using NFTs to justify copyright law, and aside from "lol copyright", legal of ownership of an NFT is even more of a mess than traditional legal ownership of an IP.