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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

> and our devices aren't really our own anymore.

This is the case with virtually everything these days. Stallman is/was right about this. You only rent the movies on Netflix, the games on Steam, the books on Amazon Kindle, and so forth. Everything could be taken away from you for absurd reasons. Who would have thought that your account could be disabled for reasons that it could get disabled today? It is not going to get better. You cannot even play a single player game offline, without running Steam. Torrents/Warez will never go away thankfully. Screw DRM anyways.

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I know GPL 3 gets a lot of flak, but it made sense when I heard him talking once, and he said something like "and then I had to add freedom 0, which gave you the right to RUN your program".

Stallman gets a lot of hate, but time keeps vindicating him. As software gets used more and more in all kind of devices, the FSF freedoms are becoming the modern consumer rights. Without having the source code of your tractor's firmware, you depend on John Deere for support. Free software is required in order to truly own devices.

There still exist game platforms that provide offline downloadable game installs. GOG.com is one example. I know this is but one example but I think it's important people reward this behavior so companies know there is demand for this.

Chiming in to mention https://itch.io

Also Zoom Platform (unrelated to the videoconferencing program, AFAIK they even predate it): https://www.zoom-platform.com/

Its selection is small but it has a few exclusives - Alien Trilogy was released recently-ish there. Also they're the only place where you can find the original Duke Nukem 3D with all of its expansions due to some perpetual contracts they had with 3D Realms before the IP was acquired by Gearbox.

I bought a game on GOG recently. It funnelled me hard into getting their terrible launcher and now requires me to start the launcher to play the game, exactly like steam. I'm sure there is some way of avoiding this but it wasn't obvious at all.

Edit: according to this post on the forum the feature is not maintained or supported (as of 2016).

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_3_wild_hunt/how_can_i_...

The "downloader" mentioned in that forum was a separate piece of software for managing downloads, like a janky proto-steam. To download the offline installers, you just need to go to the games section of your account on their website, and you can click on a game to download the installation files.

Once you have the gog galaxy installed, though, even the "offline" install files of games will automatically get integrated into it. It's horrible.

It is possible that the game you refer to has some form of Galaxy integration (GOG Galaxy has its own APIs) when installed from the client. It might still work if you uninstall Galaxy however.

But Galaxy is optional, you can download the offline installers directly from the site. I have around 680 games on GOG and all of them are in my external HDD in their offline installers - i never installed Galaxy on my PC.

At least with music, you can still generally buy and download: I’m unaware of any legal way to do the same for high-resolution video.

You sure? Up to the platform, but generally it is not the case I think. I mean sure, I paid and downloaded albums from Bandcamp before, but I use YouTube the most for music. I do not use Spotify, or Apple Music. No idea if you can download songs from those platforms. I do use SoundCloud and YouTube. I must use youtube-dl to download music from those two places. SoundCloud gives the uploader the ability to allow the downloading of the uploaded song, but in many cases it is not allowed, so youtube-dl it is. Then you can also find torrents and download your favourite bands' music in FLAC format.

youtube-dl is amazing. It supports a lot of platforms, and you can download entire playlists by just using the URL to the playlist itself.

The iTunes Store still exists and has a decent selection as does Amazon Music MP3 downloads, not to mention a bunch of smaller players like Qobuz that have FLAC and other audiophile formats. If you want to buy legally and download, it’s still possible for like 90% of the artists and genres I care about.

Ah, cheers!

YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Apple Music are all streaming services, not places to buy music. However, you can buy digital music from Amazon, the iTunes Store, Bandcamp, and other places that give you DRM free audio files. I personally think this is a fair trade off because when you pay for a streaming service you are just renting access to their library while if you really want the music for keeps you can simply purchase the music.

This year I actually spent over half an hour searching for a legal way to stream a certain series in my preferred language. Which quickly turned out to be quite a task because some streaming sites don't show non-registered visitors more than a login screen, others don't show any language options or information, and the remaining ones refuse service to my region or don't have the content in their selection, at least at that moment. Trying to find out if the search will be successful feels like trying to solve the halting problem while illegal sources offer DRM-free downloads with a single click on the first link in the search results. The disparity is stunning.

The only reason I use Kindle vs., say, Kobo, is that with Kindle for PC 1.17 I can use Calibre to strip the DRM so I own the book outright.

Against the ToS? Perhaps. But it's my book, damnit.

It's possible with Kobo too, as I recall.

How do those of us inclined... commit, represent, and impact?

Vote with your wallet.

Only buy, fix and support those who have your ideals.

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