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Comment by jasoneckert | Hacker News Reader

Excellent writeup. Asahi is my daily driver, but I've never had the need for either Spotify or Netflix. I guess the gospel of RMS and the FSF over the past few decades has steered me away from anything DRM-related.

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In terms of freedom of using compute devices, RMS has a point.

In terms of freedom of using media, I'm less annoyed by Spotify or Netflix than I am by "purchases" of media that have DRM. It's clear that one is renting with the streaming services, but Amazon can revoke permission for me to read books I have purchased or Valve can revoke permission for me to play games I have purchased, we are truly living in a dystopia.

Instead of “buy”, they should be labeled “rentals - as long as provider exists or chooses to give you access”.

The terminology should be either "License", "Buy a License", or "Purchase<br><small>Indefinite License</small>", but it's distinctively "not renting" since it's a one-time cost to obtain that indefinite license. Renting anything implies and requires some form of ongoing cost.

What "indefinite license"? They can, and do, take content off at any time...

"Indefinite" in this context means that there is no set expiration date. It doesn't mean "perpetual" or "irrevocable".

Yeah, that fits within the definition of indefinite. It's not a permanent license, and at time of sale, it's unknown when it ends.

Indefinite == not definite, i.e., not for a specific duration. It doesn’t mean ‘forever’.

"Leases"? If contract is terminated, goods go back to the owner.

When have you ever been able to buy software? I thought in most cases you just buy a license to use the software or the license says it’s free for X types of uses or sometimes “free for everyone”.

Back when it was sold on physical media; CDs, Bluray, DVD or floppy disk. Because it was a physical disk, you were allowed to do whatever you want with that disk. You weren't given the right to copy it and distribute those copies thanks to copyright, but you were allowed to resell your one physical copy due to the first sale doctrine. Hence we can quibble about the definition of "buy software", but we used to be able to do that. It's that the first sale doctrine kinda doesn't apply if you're renting software like a SaaS over the Internet; eg Adobe Photoshop/Creative Cloud.

I don’t remember it being like that with CDs and floppy’s. I’m pretty sure most of them were still a license to play.

Looking at my Diablo II (version 1.0 2000) and Warcraft III CDs I am given a license key and agreement to an EULA. Unfortunately the EULA isn’t in the box but I’m almost positive they could revoke my key and I’d be unable to play.

Blizzard trying to push renting software on us doesn't change what was legally allowed, and Diablo II and Warcraft III were after the Internet came around. Now, if you bought Warcraft I, which didn't have Battle.net support, you own that one copy, and Blizzard can't take that copy away from you. Which is to say it's bought and not rented.

Yeah the subscription services for media I like and I feel like the proposition is straightforward. I pay per month for access to a massive catalog of media. If I don’t like it I can just stop and maybe subscribe elsewhere.

It seems quite fair. There’s no mystery that it is a rental situation.

depends on the game. many steam titles don't need steam to actually run

Spotify has alternative clients like raspotify, so there you should have alternatives that don't need hacks. There's also a web client.

raspotify/spotifyd aren't alternative desktop clients, they're connect clients, great if you want to modern-ify an old amplifier, but not useful for streaming.

All of the native desktop clients (psst, spot, etc) are missing quite a few features compared to the official client, and spotify-tui is nowhere near as nice to use.

Spotifyd can be a desktop client. It doesn’t have a UI, but you can send it commands over dbus.

Spotifyd on my laptop (often started initially with connect) is my primary method of listing to Spotify.

The web client seems to install some DRM packages.

I've used ncspot extensively when on little ARM boxes - it requires a premium account, which I have, and it's just a nice little curses interface to Spotify, written in Rust, that seems to work on everything with a minimal of resource use.

I use the web client, but I find myself lamenting how it's missing basic features, like playlist management (change song order, duplicate playlist); fortunately I don't use those often, but it is quite annoying.

The web client is what requires widevine. The native clients use a custom (easier to bypass iirc) DRM scheme.

Spotify is usable with alt clients. If I was using Asahi regularly I’d probably just torrent video content that can’t be played due to drm.

> Asahi is my daily driver

I'm guessing you have an x86_64 Mac and not an arm64 Mac?

Asahi is specifically about arm64.

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