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2525 points hownottowrite | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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cooperadymas ◴[] No.21190597[source]
Is it safe to say we're in the middle of the Software Wars? The headlines have been littered with stories like this lately. From major open source contributors taking down their projects, to Apple, Adobe, and Blizzard.

It's only a matter of time until it's a critical piece of software that can cripple a nation or beleaguer it's people.

If you're looking for positives, maybe this will finally force people to rethink digital ownership.

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SkyMarshal ◴[] No.21190925[source]
I'm not clear what software has to do with this. It's happening across all industries, here's a good roundup of a bunch of other examples:

https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/07/china-censorship-daryl-mo...

Is software special in this case somehow?

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lr4444lr ◴[] No.21190974[source]
Because software has this weird status where you increasingly don't own a perpetual use right to the copy of the code you bought, and can have it revoked for reasons that have nothing to do with the purchase agreement. What if one day in the not too distant the electrical system on your car stopped working because an auto software update from that vendor (not the company that sold you the car perhaps) detected your name was on a DB of no-service-updates, and there was a critical big patched?
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1. sounds ◴[] No.21195255[source]
This was the example I thought of:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html