Re: Java and avoiding software piracy?

On Jul 21, 7:23 pm, Roedy Green <see_webs...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:40:23 -0000, Twisted <twisted...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

You buy, and it works forever, assuming you don't change or upgrade
the hardware or OS too much

That's the theory, but in practice every few weeks Microsoft upgrades
your OS.. At any point they could introduce an incompatibility.

And in practise, how often does that actually happen? Here's a hint:
in all the years I've been using WinXP I've not had an MS update break
any third-party software seriously. If worse comes to worst you roll
back the update or use System Restore and freeze at that patch level,
if the third-party app is mission-critical and there's no update
available for it.

Software as a "rental" won't help this. You'd still be stuck until the
software vendor fixed it. You wouldn't be able to avoid or roll back
the problem update either. More generally you'd have much less control
over your hardware and much less freedom to administer your machine as
you wished; more decisions would be made for you by vendors that have
ulterior motives. They will make gratuitous changes that force their
hands deeper into your pockets once they have that level of control,
because the few existing examples actually do.

1. there is no guarantee the software will work when you buy. The
assumption is, once you have the executable, if you claim not to like
it, you are lying.

And a rental would not also have no warranty and no representations of
fitness-for-purpose? In a dream world maybe.

2. there in no guarantee it will continue to work, particularly
through a hardware or OS upgrade.

And a rental company would never dream of screwing its users over by
just up and closing up shop one day? It would never push a buggy
update at its users that was a showstopper? Yeah right. At least with
normal software, if they ship a buggy update, the first users to get
burned by it warn everyone else and the rest don't install that
update. In your dream world, they have no choice -- instead of being
able to avoid the buggy update, all they can do is treat the warning
as a tornado warning and back up everything and hunker down until it's
over and the damage is done. Assuming they can back up anything,
because the data may not be really under their control anymore!

With renting, we are agreeing the software will work for a given
period of time.

Are we? I've never seen any software company agree that software will
work. Ever. I don't expect that to change anytime soon either.

The agreement can be cancelled, and the program made
to stop working. During that time I have access to all the bug fixes.
My costs are laid out in advance.

Why not let you keep using it, but not get updates? That doesn't cost
them anything. It's pure greed!

As I said before, the most outrageous practice is to make me pay for
an upgrade to get a bug fixed. That is like making you pay extra for
a defective light bulb.

Well, the way I see it, software "rental" means you pay every month
for a bug to get fixed EVEN WHEN THERE WERE NO BUGS FIXED THAT MONTH
instead of only when there actually were bugs fixed. I don't see that
as being an advantage to anyone except the vendor.

But then I already know where your sympathies lie. You're
contemplating being such a vendor, not being one of the hapless users
screwed by such a vendor, and that is why you are pushing something
that would harm 99.99% of the population and benefit only 0.01%.

.

Relevant Pages

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