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A comment on Proprietary Software Is Often Malware. Parent comment

Re:Proprietary Software Is Often Malware by shadowgovt on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @02:58PM (#26005773)
Boycott it. If enough users cease to buy the OS, Microsoft suffers economic consequence and may change the design to adapt to customer desires.

This model works less well for free software / open source, which often has a lack of financial incentives to motivate (or demotivate) developers.

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Re:Proprietary Software Is Often Malware by shaan7 on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @03:13PM (#26005983)
> Boycott it. If enough users cease to buy the OS

So I have to convince thousands (for Windows maybe a million) of people that the thing that irritates me should be removed. Nope, that seldom happens. I find better luck in FOSS where there is enough tweaking potential that I can remove the irritating thing I don't like. Maybe FOSS maintainers and developers have no financial incentive to do what I want, but I can always have a local patch to do that.

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Re:Proprietary Software Is Often Malware by throwaway314158 on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @05:10PM (#26007587)
> So I have to convince thousands (for Windows maybe a million) of people that the thing that irritates me should be removed.

No, you can alternatively pay money for a different tier of license that lets you turn it off.

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Re:Proprietary Software Is Often Malware by shaan7 on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:25AM (#26011983)
You are assuming that such a tier exists (remember, my comment was not specific to telemetry)
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Re:Proprietary Software Is Often Malware by shadowgovt on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @04:05PM (#26006622)
Absolutely. You (with your training and ability to manipulate software, test, debug, and deploy) can make the change you like (and maintain it in perpetuity if you can't find someone to take on upstream maintenance).

This is not an option most software users have, but it's probably an option for most readers of this forum.

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Re:Proprietary Software Is Often Malware by shaan7 on Tuesday February 02, 2021 @04:27PM (#26006960)
> This is not an option most software users have

Yes, but the good thing is that more and more people are learning how to program so I am hopeful that things will get better :)

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