I wonder if OP could have changed his CC number to a disposable CC instead of paying out 11 months to cancel?
You can also buy prepaid debit cards at supermarkets, post offices, etc (at least in Australia) which allow you to do the same thing.
You can also buy prepaid debit cards at supermarkets, post offices, etc (at least in Australia) which allow you to do the same thing.
Similarly, doing this to a Steam account or iTunes account cuts off your access to all your previously "purchased" content.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/crackers-say-denuvo-d...
That's the point. Companies have proved themselves not accountable to their customers.
A modder distributed a tool to bypass the anti-cheat and restore performance the same day the expansion released. It took over two weeks for Capcom to get the game playable again, and many more before they improved performance back to roughly pre-update levels.
For reference, I'd been using Steam Proton to play the base game on Linux and was getting 60fps at nearly max settings. After the update, I got 1. One frame per second. I saw a number of similar reports from native Windows players.
This is kind of expected for online gaming due to many folks fucked up mentality of using cheats and playing with rest of the crowd (some psychologists could probably go quite deep on breaking this down to mostly childhood issues). If you play on your own, its just a pain in the a.
Many people buy the game and then play pirated version, just to avoid this kind of punishment of the lawful citizens.
Probably over half the popular multiplayer products on Steam have rootkits in them that send a lot of data about you straight to the publisher. Companies are not accountable for the things you want them to be accountable for, so for normal people it just looks like they're not accountable at all.
Playing pirated game is putting trust into the hands of some anonymous hackers. And that begs the question, what do they gain from giving out the game for free?
They could be doing it just for fun, for coolness, or out of altruism. And that's true for probably many case. But to say none of them wanted to earn expedient money would not persuade me.
Malware and Spyware is pretty common with purchased games, of course they call it "DRM" but it has the same goal and purpose
In addition to gp's point: After settling my income I began buying software (games mostly) on steam/etc to support studios I like, but it is still much easier to torrent it afterwards and to not deal with bs that stores represent. I never realized before how much hassle it is to own a legal version of everything. You pay your money and they don't even bother of your convenience or digital rights, only theirs. Recently I bought starcrart remastered (without torrenting) and that battle.net downloads over 200mb over my adsl line every flipping time I try to run it. As a result, I just watch falcon pal match reviews at youtube and never run it. Blizzard deserved that money for sure, but man isn't that stupid.
Yes, you can increase your value to the project thousandfold with more direct contributions like coding, bugfixes, donations, community work, etc, but already being part of the community is of help.
https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/
If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions).
If you want your open source developers to eat, they need cold hard cash.
From the lwn link above:
> Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling Desktop LibreOffice.
> Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.
> We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office customer since 2018 - zero.
(for context: the former LibreOffice development team of SUSE joined Collabora in 2013, so they're not a scrappy new startup completely disjointed from Libreoffice)
Whether problem reports are a help or hindrance depends strongly on the type of report. A low information "it broke" post is a hindrance. A high information post giving steps to reproduce, having looked for similar bug reports, giving system details needed to reproduce the report, should be a help.
200 million users means the community is huge. Not every project is in a situation like that. It means that Libreoffice creates tremendous value around the globe, and extracting just some of that value means the development efforts can be grown.
There are positive things in that e-mail as well: many large institutional users do contribute back.
Also note that well researched bug reports can be helpful for the community, especially if you post workarounds you found into the bug thread, and the thread is accessible by search.
As for Collabora, I'm not sure how much they engage in marketing? Maybe if they increase such efforts/change strategy they can grow their number of customers.
For example, in one of my last job (I'm a freelance), I could get paid full time to contribute to open source tools because the guy taking the decision heard about PostgreSQL and open source somewhere. If that guy has only heard about Oracle, the same work would have gone closed source.
If the person responsible for the office solution of a school heard of open office from you, you did help a lot. Because many times, big open source users will invest in open source, in form of support, custom development or just sponsoring.
If a company does something sketchy and you cancel or reverse the charges, you generally lose everything on the account - not just the thing you're disputing.
Adobe is similar to Steam in that a single account is likely to have a variety of different products associated with it. If you somehow end up in a dispute involving Steam and reverse a charge, Valve will (IIRC) close out your entire account.
The card industry imposes a lot of regulation on merchants in the name of security (e.g. PCI) and customer experience (e.g. not allowing merchants to demand secondary ID for in-person transactions). Retaliation fraud by subscription merchants is something the card industry could stop and the industry should not be let off the hook for allowing this practice.
Neither, for that matter, should governments be given a free pass. Consumer dispute resolution processes exist for a reason (in no small part to reduce the load on the legal system) and circumventing them should not be tolerated.
It would be good if cards had a white or black list option.