3 ms·
Free things are only free until they become 1. discontinued 2. commercialized (paid), or 3. broken with nobody to fix it IMO the only free services and free
by lionkor 3y ago
Free things are only free until they become
1. discontinued
2. commercialized (paid), or
3. broken with nobody to fix it
IMO the only free services and free software (free as in free beer) you can rely on is software that is open source or source available (in its entirety).
Lets disregard the "youre the product" (and the fact that the hardware wasnt free) for a second and focus on the fact that all these dead services have one thing in common: They shut down because theyre centralized, or because their development is centralized. If an open source project (where all parts are open source) is developed by a paid dev team, and they abandon the project and kill the dev team, the code remains and people can continue to use it if they wish to maintain it also.
I'm no stallman, and I dont generally care for idealistic arguments, but this may be one of those rare times when the "FOSS is better" crowd has a really good point.
Even if its source available, or a non-commercial license, thats still more pro-consumer than whatever google fit et al did.
- zarzavat 3y agoGoogle has several completely free services. I won’t name them because I’m superstitious that they will get shut down after I write this comment. Google doesn’t shut down services because they are free. It shuts down services because they are unpopular at trillion dollar corporation scale. Stadia was paid and it got shut down too. Unfortunately, this leads to the second-order effect of people not using new Google services because they are afraid it will get shut down.
- globular-toast 3y agoIt's easy for things to get forgotten about at big companies. But sooner or later someone looking for a promotion will discover it, shut it down and put the saved money part on their CV.
- mococa 3y agoThey are not free, you are the product. There is no free lunch.
- beretguy 3y ago> They shut down because theyre centralized Let’s add computer games to the list while we are at it, please https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
- CoconutPilot 3y agoFree is only Free when it is disconnected.