You seem to have trouble understanding the fact that people can buy things and share them with those who can’t.

I’ve already given you an example of the game Mindustry, which people buy on Steam (16k reviews): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry, even though it’s released under a free software license and you can get it for free on Itch: https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry and you can get its source code on GitHub: https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry.

The only reason why the industry is surviving is because most people understand that they need to pay for the entertainment they consume.

Weird, huh? For some reason the internet and Bittorrent hasn’t changed that.

They never hacked your computer, you agreed to everything. So what’s the problem then? It’s just a file that can be shared.

A lot of people don’t have a problem with that. I do, which is why I don’t use proprietary software. If I took a photo of myself (or of anything else) and posted it publicly on social media, I would do it under a free license, so that people could share it. I do that with software that I make. But that doesn’t mean I want to share everything - there are many things I want to keep private, so I will not post them publicly. There is no contradiction here.

I’m not talking only about you. I’m talking about how senseless the “I can share files with anyone” is. If that were true, companies could really fuck their customers, but thankfully it isn’t logical, thus it is illegal.

I’m pretty sure companies already legally sell user data, though? Laws don’t define what is logical or what is moral.

Imagine if a single person could buy a movie and then place it in their Facebook to share with their friends. And then their friends share with their friends. And so on… because it’s just a file, nobody is stealing, copying information isn’t stealing! … Who would make a movie under those conditions?

People already share movies online and it’s very easy. You don’t have to pay for any digital file ever, but people choose to do it anyway. Copying files is not stealing, because it’s not a physical object - you can make an infinite amount of copies at no cost.

If you want to own the movie, you need to buy a real copy. If you are buying a digital copy, you do not own the movie. There is already a solution for your problem, real copies.

Movies sold on DVD and Blu-ray contain DRM. You can’t make copies (even for personal use) without breaking the DRM, which is illegal. If there was no DRM, you could at least make copies for personal use, which would be an improvement, but you still wouldn’t own the files.

So sure, if you want a bunch of industries to die, keep believing and convincing others of that.

Copying and sharing files only keeps getting easier and those industries haven’t died. People even sell things like games and books under a free license. One such game is Mindustry - I bought a copy myself and I can legally share it with anyone. This game is even available for free on some platforms, but people buy it anyway.

The only reason you can watch your pirated movie is the fact that other people actually pay for the content. So you’re really stealing from people who now have to pay more to access the content.

You can’t steal something that’s infinite. I would pay for the movies though (even if they aren’t released under a free license) if there was a way to buy them without DRM. But there isn’t and I’m not going to support unethical practices with my money.

There could be a website where you would be able to buy DRM-free movies and you could download them. We have such stores for music, books and games. But the movie studios are greedy, so they choose to abuse people with DRM.

Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.

Only if it’s a file that’s already publicly available. When you buy a movie, why shouldn’t you be able to share it with others? I’m not saying that you should be able to hack a filmmaker’s computer and publish movies they’ve never released, though.

The scenario you described can’t happen to me anyway, because I only use Free Software. You can learn more about it here: https://piped.video/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM

They shouldn’t collect data in the first place.

I think it’s easier for a person to say “piracy is bad” than “sharing files is bad”. Because why would sharing be wrong? But if you give it a bad name, a lot of people will automatically assume that it is something bad. It’s a simple trick, but it works. If we want to change the way people think about copyright, we shouldn’t let anyone imply that sharing information is the same as stealing ships and murdering people on them.

“Piracy” is a propaganda term. We shouldn’t use it. There is nothing wrong with sharing files.

Introduce him to game development with Godot engine. I don’t know any specific tutorials, but you should be able to find something on YouTube.

You can also introduce him to the Free Software movement: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

That’s great! It’s still a bit disappointing that so many people decided to stay on Reddit, though. They made a big protest just for everything to go back to normal.

They work for people whose priority is freedom and that are GNU/Linux experts. So I don’t think it’s productive to make general statements like that. If there is something that sucks (like battery life), you should say what it is exactly.

Conjure familiars? Buy a dish washer or cleaner service or whatever.

Also washing machines, robot vacuums, robot lawn mowers.

We write incantations to make the magic rock think and give us answers.

People deserve to be able to control their own devices, but you are saying that we should be happy if they can get only some control? Having to run even one program that you can’t control is bad. So I see no reason why I should be happy with that. I see no reason why we should lower our standards and let somebody get away with doing unethical things to us. We can do much better than that. Hurd is irrelevant and we don’t need it. We certainly don’t need to let Valve abuse us.

You are right that the world isn’t black and white, but proprietary software and libre software are incompatible ideas. You can’t have freedom when someone is actively trying to take it away from you. Developers of proprietary software are our enemies and we can’t support them. If we let developers have power over us, they will abuse it. It’s been happening for decades and it will never stop. We need to work on making our society less dependent on non free software, not find ways to sustain our dependence. If you want to run a proprietary game on your system that’s your choice, but we don’t have to pretend that the developer of that game isn’t doing something unethical and that there isn’t an ethical way.

I also don’t think people will take much more abuse, the EU is also pushing back hard against abusive US companies.

Yes, but it’s not good enough by itself. It’s nice that Windows users can now uninstall Edge or whatever, but it’s only in EU and that’s just one of many terrible things Microsoft has been doing to their users. It is a small improvement and I’m glad they are doing something (other than spending lots of money on funding free software projects every year), but the law is not enough.

We will keep enough freedom. It’s a gradient.

But you are not just proposing a journey to freedom. You are proposing that we should accept proprietary software and praise companies that develop it, because it will somehow give us more freedom in the future. You want us to support the same type of abuse that we need to get away from.

I get that proprietary software and DRM is a general problem, and Steam is part of that problem, but completely getting rid of that is simply a battle for another time, further in the future. The first battle is to get Windows users abandon their Microsoft/Apple cages, and that’s a win that’s actually within reach now.

The free software movement was started 40 years ago. We can’t just give up now. How many years should we wait? People are only becoming more dependent on computers and our problems keep getting worse. Windows users have been able to abandon it many years ago, but they don’t care about freedom.

Windows also becomes worse by itself, further accelerating the change.

I had the same feeling about 10 years ago, but users of proprietary software are willing to take a lot of abuse. It’s almost impressive how stubborn they are. This includes users of Reddit, Twitter, Apple and others. I don’t think Microsoft will lose any significant amount of users just by abusing them more, and when it comes to features, Windows is improving lately.

That’s important, because running a proprietary OS is still much worse than running some proprietary applications or games on a free OS. A closed OS completely shifts control away from the user, leaving only what the developer allows you to do, and it allows the dev to always push his or her agenda by favoring applications from the same developer, and allowing the developer to establish proprietary APIs and libraries like DirectX which was problematic for the competition for quite some time.

I agree that more freedom is better, but if people don’t understand the end goal, they will keep making the same mistakes. SteamOS is proprietary. Most of the popular GNU/Linux distros have proprietary software in their repositories. On mobile I see people switching from proprietary Android to proprietary Sailfish OS. They just keep falling in the same traps over and over again. Steam is one of those traps. If GNU/Linux became mainstream on desktop today, I have no doubt that it would be a proprietary distro. Then it will be only a matter of time before it turns into something even more proprietary like Windows. Because why wouldn’t it?

A regular user does not understand the ethics behind closed and open source and will never choose a worse free option over a better proprietary one. That either means the free options must become true rivals, or - which is the easier goal for now - the proprietary apps have to run on Linux just as well as people are used to.

That’s why we must explain it to them. Some will listen and others will not, but there is nothing else we can do. We are doing our best to rival the proprietary apps, but it’s a battle we’ve been fighting for 40 years. There will always be something missing and even if there isn’t, it will always be inconvenient to switch from something you already know. Reddit users could switch to Lemmy, but they won’t. If at some point they decide to switch to some other proprietary alternative, that will not fix their problem. It will be only a matter of time before the other company or developer starts abusing them too.

A “war” isn’t being won all at once instantly, but by winning several smaller battles after one another. Which takes time.

I know, but if we make compromises on our freedom, we will never keep it. The companies that make proprietary software will not let us. They could make money from developing libre software instead, but they don’t have to, because our society thinks non free software is fine.

I wasn’t disregarding Valve’s contributions to free software. I’m glad to hear that they have contributed so much and I would like to read more about them if you have the links. They deserve to be praised for that, but it doesn’t cancel out all the bad things that they’ve been doing for many years. Microsoft (for example) contributes to free software too, but at the same time they take away their user’s freedom. Valve deserves criticism for this just like Microsoft deserves criticism for the unethical things that they are doing. It’s awesome that Valve is contributing to a good cause in the last few years, but look how much freedom they have taken away from us.

It seems very important to you that people use GNU/Linux, but if they will be using Steam and other proprietary software, how is that better than them using Windows? They still won’t be able to control their own computers, so what’s the point? The goal isn’t to have people leave one proprietary ecosystem to become trapped in another. The goal is for them to have freedom. I want to live in a free society. The only way to make that happen is to destroy proprietary software. So as long as Valve makes non free software and takes away their user’s freedom with DRM, they are our enemy. Just like Microsoft, Apple, Google and any other company that does the same.

It seems that your goal is to have the most features, but the goal of GNU/Linux and the free software movement is to have freedom - something that Valve doesn’t want their users to have.

PS
GOG’s client is proprietary, which is terrible, but at least it’s not required and there is a libre alternative - Heroic Games Launcher (it works on GNU/Linux too).

It looks awesome! Unfortunately Artemis-RGB is proprietary software. OpenRGB’s Effects Plugin has an Ambilight option, so maybe that could be used instead? I’m not sure how much you can configure it.

I should absolutely be able to sell my license to a game to another person. It’s bizarre that I can in the physical world

Actually you can’t, since most PC games contain Valve’s DRM, even if you buy a physical copy :). So best you can do is sell your Steam account and risk getting banned.

Edit:

Also from just a platform standpoint it’s absurd I can’t disable updates on steam

People have told me that you can do that now. But once you update, I doubt that you can go back to the previous version if the new one turns out to be worse. Devs can literally remove features from their games. Most patches are useful though, so if your only options are getting all updates or not getting any, it sucks.

Windows and other proprietary software is unethical, because it gives developers power over users. People can’t easily see what such software does on their device and they can’t change it. So they can’t control those programs and as a result they have no control over their own devices. It’s also very easy for developers to abuse those users with spyware, DRM and other malicious features. In case of Windows we know for a fact that it does those things. But even if it didn’t, people deserve to be able to control their computers, so it’s unethical to take that right away from them.

Free software gives you the 4 essential freedoms. Any programmer in the world can audit what such program does and change it. So it’s very hard for a developer to abuse their users. If they add some malicious feature, any programmer can remove it and share the modified version with others. So with free software, it’s the users who are in control (as long as there is at least one programmer among them that can make the changes they want).

https://piped.video/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM

You are right that it looks pretty bad. It’s a shame, since they don’t have much competition.

As I said, in this case you could have both convenience and freedom. You just don’t care enough to try to change your situation. Most gamers do the same and that’s why the game industry is so bad.