Thinking outside the pirate bubble
Thinking outside the pirate bubble
That post about the Office 2019 license expiring on Mac (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/70667106) made me think how many of us might not understand how people outside the pirate bubble deal with situations like that. My understanding is that the post's author completely misses the point regarding what's happening here. Those who bought an Office license back in 2019 are very much likely to have upgraded their packages already, so they won't even know about this expiration date. The very few who are still using their old Office version will react at that as if it were a notification, buy a new one and won't bother about it at all.
My point is that their relationship with paying for software is very different from how a pirate sees it; paying for a new version of an application every couple of years is not a problem for them. It's like gamers who buy Call of Duty or EA Sports titles every year. It doesn't make them idiots, it's just a different way of dealing with money and that service
Is a rent-based economic system something new?
I used to rent VHS tapes and DVDs to watch movies for years. I never bought a VHS or a DVD in my life, and I watched hundreds of movies in those formats. Same thing for SNES games. Most of them I played after renting their cartridges for a weekend.
The only difference now is that the publishers are renting their products directly to us and making this their main source of income, making owning the products harder (or just plain impossible). But most third-world boys like me are used to this. I would never own official stuff anyway but I still have been consuming their content for decades.