Re:Proprietary Software Is Often Malware
by throwaway314158 on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @05:05PM
(#26007536)
A dandelion can either be a weed or part of a salad. It's a matter of context.
> You can call it subscription based, you can also call it user lock-in or remote killswitch.
If you stop paying for your gym membership and your access card gets automatically revoked, do you consider that to be some kind of physical instantiation of malware?
Re:Proprietary Software Is Often Malware
by reificator on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @05:31PM
(#26007888)
If the muscles I built at that gym were incompatible with any other gym, yeah I probably would.
Metaphors don't work as well as people think.
You can call it DRM, you can also call it user restriction.
You can call it serving ads, you can also call it remote code injection.
You can call it subscription based, you can also call it user lock-in or remote killswitch.
There is not a lot of modern proprietary software that wouldn't fall into these categories. I know a lot of people claim not to care about it, that is a separate issue, but the fact is that most proprietary software is in fact malware, even if people don't mind installing malware.