"Buy Nothing Day" Was Yesterday. Today... Download BSDs and GNU/Linux Day (No Need to Buy).
Time to digitally liberate oneself ahead of the new year
THE International Buy Nothing Day is over, even in the Western countries where shops have already closed (maybe not online 'stores', but they mark a fake 'holiday' anyway... and will likely extend it to maximise profits).
With clown computing and the proprietary software it embodies (plus buzzwords du jour) we're meant to think that renting is the way forward and people oughtn't possess anything, not even their own personal data, less alone computing or copies of what they 'purchased'. Pentagon-connected firms are moving to rental-type business models as they seek to perpetually control people and exhaust their already-limited financial resources. Yanis Varoufakis has a whole new book about it and his publicist contacted me some days ago.
Do not fall for clown computing and any proprietary software; do not listen to sites that encourage you to replace Free software with some proprietary offering (like Jack Wallen just did). It's never worth it. It's a form of "techno-fascism" or "techno-feudalism", to borrow increasingly popular terms.
Looking at yesterday's announcement from LibreOffice (issued just less than 2 days ago), they miss the point somewhat because "they mean proprietary formats (plural) as Microsoft changes the formats still as the continuing means of forcing new purchases, as it has done for decades," to quote an associate of ours.
Open standards are also very important. If you're using LibreOffice, be sure to adopt OpenDocument Format (ODF), not "Microsoft" anything. When I used OpenOffice.org 20 years ago I actively tried to convince colleagues not to use .DOC files and instead adopt LATEX or OpenOffice formats (well, now we have ODF).
In other news, "traditional" news sites bemoan changes to Google's search/indexing algorithm. They're paying the price for their short-sighted submission to "techno-feudalism". In 2023 they rely on so-called "search" (censorship engines) and social control media for visibility (NO RSS FEEDS! No feasibility!). In other words, they rely on hostile third parties, usually from another consistent. Google is not in the business of access to knowledge and Google is not a software company, either. It is a spying and brainwash (ads are a subset of this) company. Software is merely a delivery mechanism. If Google is a software company, how come it barely makes money actually selling software?
"Selling software is bullshit and 1980s mindset," an associated reminds us. "Real software companies stopped selling software per se by the early 1990s..."
Why are some people still buying software? Why are people buying hardware from Apple, where all the premiums are basically for the software on those devices? Apple hardware isn't even Apple's (it's just branding), it's usually some generic thing that has Apple's stuff pre-loaded, and of course it is proprietary.
Why not avoid all this hassle and simply move to Free software? Downloading a large distribution of BSD or GNU/Linux is the easiest way. Even downloading a very small distro, then adding lots of Free software on top of it, to be retrieved over the Internet...
Just because it doesn't cost anything doesn't mean it doesn't work well.
We need to appreciate things based on their value, not their cost. █