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by Brian_K_White 907 days ago
But it's the simple facts.

The best possible, most correct, most defensible, most world-improving advice to give for dealing with a user-hostile product or service, is to have the strength of will to reject it and live without it, and live the example to show that it's possible and you won't die.

Or at the very least, it is AT LEAST as defensible a stance as "The more pragmatic/adult approach is to give the bully whatever they want than to go without their product or service".

That philosophy is not remotely automatically more correct or more adult or nuanced or any of the self-serving words anyone typically uses to try to grant their idea more legitimacy than it deserves.

Calling the principled stance "hostile" is itself hostile.

You can phrase it in a way that sounds emotional and shortsighted and jeuvenile, and certainly there are many juveniles who are guilty of that.

Never the less, rejecting a bad deal is still fundamentally a reaction not an action, a defense not an offense.

The publisher promulgating a user-hostile deal is inarguably the offender, the initial hostile actor.

You can decide that the bad deal is tolerable for yourself, but that is entirely your weakness and does not make that policy smarter or more correct than that of those that decline.

1 comments

I genuinely appreciate you proving my point.

I am not here debating DRM or anticheat. Simple pointing out that telling someone the game they play is garbage because it uses anticheat does nothing but hurts the Linux ecosystem.

You can come up with another essay but I don’t think it disproves what I am saying. Telling someone the game they play is garbage is not increasing the Linux user base. I am sure there will be a retort here, “we don’t want those kind of users or related software”.

Who said "we don't want those kind of users"? The game publishers are saying that!

The people you're trying to criticize are themselves only rejecting the software and the publishers that use it, and for a completely explicable and defensible reason, not because it's the wrong tribal colors or religion.

You are consistently neglecting to acknowledge the basic order of operations and ignoring the initial act and offense in order to focus on a reaction that you don't like and to excuse the initial act that you personally don't have a problem with.

I am saying that you only have the right to say that the deal proposed by drm and anticheat systems is acceptable to you, not to go one mm further to say that anyone else is ogbligated to feel the same, and is in any way hostile or harming the ecosystem or anything like that if they don't.