Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription...
by coldtea on Friday January 21, 2022 @06:48PM
(#30031497)
>You own a license to use it (with some level of constraints around how/when/where you use it)
That's neither here, nor there. I didn't argue we buy and then own software like a shoe or a tire. People bought software before and we know the semantic and legal differences between it and buying physical products.
But that's irrelevant, the discussion is about software-bought (with the license and all it entails) vs software subscription -- not about the semantics of bought software vs bought physical stuff.
That has [effectively] never been the case
You don't "own" software once you buy it
You own a license to use it (with some level of constraints around how/when/where you use it)
Even if that license happens to let you use it as much as you want anywhere you want, that doesn't mean it will continue to work "forever"
So many people don't understand that digital products are nothing at all like physical ones (except that you pay for both) - you own a paper book (albeit with restrictions on what you can do with it (can't make infinite/excessive copies of parts or all of it, etc), you have a license to an ebook; you don't own a copy of Microsoft Office - you have purchased permission to use it on X-many devices running Y operating system(s)
Even if you "own" some copy of a public domain or freeware tool, it's still constrained by the system(s) it will run on