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You’re ignoring the fact that it’s nearly impossible to implement this right now. Big pharma and numerous politicians want to keep the status quo for as long as possible. By the time we have more affordable medicine, numerous people would have suffered greatly or died because they couldn’t access the medicine they need. Having solutions that don’t require an entire rework of the healthcare industry is necessary so that we can save as many lives as possible.
When most people say “free software”, they’re talking about software that’s free as in freedom. Using it otherwise just causes unnecessary confusion.
If by “most people” you mean the general population, you are absolutely wrong. Hell, even software devs (at least in the US) would fight with you unless they themselves are interested in FOSS.
When the average Joe pays nothing for an item that they want, regardless of whether that item can be modified, they will say that the item is free. To your average Joe, software is yet another item.
Reasonable control in the legal sense does matter though. Right now, a majority of creatives don’t own their IP in the legal sense, and they can’t stop large companies from milking their works dry as a result. In the absence of IP laws, creatives would be able to create their works, but they’d also be competing against companies that have the resources to monetize, influence the general public, and kill the franchise through poor choices.
It’s really important to know that the vast majority of people aren’t going to have the goodwill to tip or otherwise support free works, and it’s even less likely if a large company does enough marketing to overshadow an artist.
I already understand the point of the video. I’m saying that the point of the video doesn’t reflect the wishes and wills of all artists. If someone pours their heart and soul into something, they should have reasonable control over how that something is used by other people. The last thing we want is to demotivate those artists from making great works.
If a distributor for Korean movies in the US was the only company that subtitled a movie in Spanish for example, then Netflix would have to make a deal with them to include subtitles for every region. It might be that the distributor themselves may not have the rights to distribute those subtitles outside the US as well.
I wasn’t joking.
A good chunk of scam calls and texts come from people who themselves are victims of kidnapping. Many of those victims (primarily in Asia) got into the position they were in because they were looking for work, went to a different country to start a promised job, and then got trapped and forced to work for scam centers that do social engineering attacks.
These scam centers are sophisticated to the point where they can develop very legitimate-looking crypto trading platforms for targets in the US and other wealthy countries. They then assign one of the kidnapped people to a target. These kidnapped people then social engineer their way for months to get what their captors want - usually money in the aforementioned trading platform. Then, they cut all contact once they have control of the funds.
How does this relate to XZ? Well, if they can kidnap ordinary people looking for jobs, there’s not much stopping them from including devs in their pool of targets. Afterward, it’s just a rinse and repeat of what they’d done before.
If you want to look more into pig butchering, John Oliver has a great episode on it.
My guess is that R&D as well as third-party Steam keys eat into their margins.
It could be more sustainable with this higher fee as well. Valve supports old games for a long time whereas console manufacturers pull the plug 10 years later. You could argue that Microsoft takes only 12%, but Microsoft has the luxury of being able to exit the PC games market at any time, or they can take a loss on it indefinitely. Valve needs to survive off its PC store because it’s the only thing they really have
They are losing money on streaming. It was so bad that they took their cash cow HBO and grouped it with their streaming divisions to improve their financial report. WBD is making insane decisions because their #1 goal is to increase free cash flow to pay off their debts, whereas most companies’ #1 goal is to “increase shareholder value.”
I don’t think you fully understand right to repair.
Companies (most egregiously Apple, but Samsung, Microsoft, and other tech, farming, and medical companies as well) have been actively introducing barriers to self or third-party repairs for decades. Apple serializes their displays on iPhones, so if you were to swap the screen on an iPhone without Apple’s authorization or without specific hardware, your iPhone disables specific features on your new screen, even if it’s a genuine Apple part. Apple also has incredibly unfair and invasive contracts with their authorized service providers such that they have to provide a slower return window than Apple’s own service centers. Furthermore, Apple et al. don’t sell every part needed to fix phones, and even when they do sell parts, they are often sold as packages or bundles that make the parts unnecessarily expensive.
To be clear, it’s rare for companies to ban third-party repairs outright. However, the vast majority of device makers artificially limit who can buy spare parts and who can fix their devices via software, by tight supply chain control, lawsuits, or getting governments to seize the few parts that could be obtained. This means that most third-party stores can’t compete with manufacturers because they can’t get genuine parts without becoming “authorized”, and by becoming authorized, they can’t provide a quality service.