I think that a bigger concern than subscription software (although, that’s a big concern) is that consolidation and the long game for control of the market is centralizing almost all of these major services into the hands of organizations that are large military vendors, fully integrated members of the military-industrial complex.
Microsoft is about as far up in there as anyone could get with the possible exceptions of Lockheed or Boeing, and they now own GitHub, NPM, LinkedIn, and others. Go into the concentration camps down in Texas and they’re running Exchange on Windows, happily provided by Microsoft. One day they’ll be regarded as IBM is today for so eagerly participating in the holocaust. (Or, hopefully, moreso, as IBM seems to have recovered and is even branding things Watson after their founder who met personally with Hitler.)
Amazon, operators of Twitch and now Luna (and of course AWS) actually built and maintain a custom, airgapped, on-prem AWS region for the CIA, on CIA property, to hold their spying data (and presumably drone videos and the like). They run a whole special AWS internet-connected region just for the US government, too, with the associated dictated-by-federal-regulation racist hiring policies for staff that can enter the building.
I see zillions of people happily using Twitch, and I wonder what percentage of them know that they’re giving money and brand awareness to an organization that helps the US military conduct mass murder by drone, or run a global network of torture prisons where anyone the CIA likes can be held forever without trial.
I’m super angry about the subscriptionization of software, to be sure, and I’ll cosign your rant. I’m making a point of switching to Davinci Resolve (Blackmagic) from Premiere because they specifically reject Adobe’s bullshit “pay for this FOREVER” model and let you buy it outright up front.
I’m far more worried, though, about what happens when a majority of people are necessarily furnishing their data wholesale to companies who will happily provide all of their user data to their largest customer, the US military, on demand, without oversight. I think that’s a far bigger danger to a society that already appears in many respects to have become a military dictatorship.
I sure hope I’m wrong about where all of this is headed, because it looks really, really bad.
Apologies for jumping on board the rant thread.