• 4am@lemmy.zip
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    3 hours ago

    All software has been licensed since day 1. You have never owned software in your life, even if you have a disc.

    • Limonene@lemmy.world
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      17 minutes ago

      When you buy software on a DVD, you own the software, at least until you install it and agree to the clickwrap agreement that revokes your ownership.

      In the olden days, we installed software by copying it off floppy disks onto our hard drives. There was no clickwrap agreement, because there was no installer. We owned that software.

      GOG advertises that purchasers own the software they buy. https://www.gog.com/en/news/welcome_to_gog

      Lots of open source software can be owned. You have to do something that grants you ownership in the first place, like buying it on a disc. Downloading it for free might or might not, I don’t know. But no FOSS license I know of has any clause that revokes ownership. The GPLv2 has a specific clause that says

      You are not required to accept this License

      so you can always choose to reject the whole GPL, and revert back to the implicit rules of commerce, “Pay money, receive thing” which confers ownership.

    • Noja@sopuli.xyz
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      1 hour ago

      That’s just false, you can still buy and sell the games that you bought on disk 15 years ago. It doesn’t matter that you only own a license to the software as long as you own the whole end product.