So it's undeniable that proprietary software has a place in the market - we're long past the age where all software came free as part of a hardware sale and way too early in the evolution of the media to have all software be free/libre for good and, most of all, there are billions (maybe trillions) of dollars behind proprietary software models right now that won't easily shift to better formats anytime soon, so we better learn to deal with it. But if current trends in proprietary software aren't curbed soon, the licensing landscape can look very ugly in a few years, as I wish to explore in this text.
First comes the "pig in a bag" issue (or "gato por lebre" in my native Portuguese) where what you buy and what you get can be completely different things. The fact that End User License Agreements have never been tested in court and are so far regarded to be valid from the moment you click "Install" has been breeding constant contractions of user rights, some which would be outright illegal if analysed by any sane optic. Buying software used to mean you owned it and therefore could resell it or move it to a new computer once the one you're using to read this blog post on goes South or whatever, but a cursory glance on an EULA these days will show you otherwise - you're merely a licensee and that copy of Windows or Photoshop you paid for still belongs to the publisher. Not only that, but it's probably restricted to one install, to the current machine you own. Not only that, but it's perfectly legal for the publisher to test your hardware and, should it ever change, accuse you of having moved it to a different machine and disabling your license. Not only that, but you might have to ping a licensing server every few days (during such visit they'll probably pull some usage information "for marketing purposes") so you can remain licensed - just ask Adobe Creative Suite users what it feels like when Adobe goes offline and they can't use Photoshop. Not only that, but it might be simply impossible to use your software without internet connection, even if there's no need for you to be online at all - many videogame publishers have seen the online gaming experience as a nice way to curb piracy and now think it's fair to stop you from playing offline even if it's a single player game.
So what's next? Subscription is already a thing - Microsoft Office and Creative Suite are now available in a yearly version along with the "bought" version (which with every restriction they add gets shittier until it finally feels like paying for a subscription is no longer such a stupid deal). Digital Rights Restriction Management already makes pirating games easier than playing the version you paid for and for every new restriction they get away with, they'll come up with a more outlandish one, so soon you'll be jumping through extra hoops to use proprietary software that you paid for. But there's a silver lining, which is mobile software. Mobile users (especially Android users) are profoundly less tolerant to bullshit pricing schemes and they expect the software they bought for their phone to run on their tablet or their next phone and so on, so it's entirely possible that, as mobile becomes more important than workstations, proprietary software vendors get pushed back harder and come up with saner licensing schemes, and with Chromebooks and convertibles and etc the category as a whole may well cease to exist and everything we call mobile may simply be the personal computers of the future.
Time will tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment