• 1 Post
  • 109 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

help-circle













  • office package doesnt just come with windows any more

    strictly speaking, it never was part of windows, or came bundled with it from Microsoft. Our first family windows computer (Win 98) didn’t come with an office license, instead the manufacturer included only “Word” and “Works” as a “value add”. It was a separate piece of software that we could install (or not if we chose to).

    Up to including windows 7, every single computer any of my friends and family purchased came only with a windows license, If they wanted MS Office, they had to buy the license separately and install the software package themselves. Sometimes it might have come preinstalled as a trial, but that still required purchasing a license after a set amount of time (usually 90 days, I believe), and it varied from OEM to OEM, as did their other bloatware (Norton, Eset, etc.).

    I have only noticed Windows installing office out of the box with Windows 10/11, where they install the app from the MS store during the initial setup - I assume they started this on Windows 8 as well, but I have only seen PCs being upgraded from 7 to 8/8.1, never a fresh install.

    But even then, it’s just a limited trial for their office 365 suite.




  • Personally, that reads to me that there already is en expiration date on the plugin version as well as the GOG extension.

    Either way, while they are free to charge what they see fit, I was flabbergasted by the high price and it being a subscription. I’d argue it should never be their bread and butter. I see the target audience to be too niche for this to be a fulltime gig, I dont believe there’s going to be enough users for this to be sustainable, which is (I guess) the reason they went for a SAAS subscription model.

    Yes, the plugin version is open source, but I don’t believe anyone is going to bother to fork it. Simply because there already is a sophisticated, quite advanced community project (Heroic) that does the job well on a steam deck, also works very well on the desktop, and uses the same backends (legendary, gogdl, nile) as JS.

    And it really irks me, that they rely on free, open-source components for their proprietary, closed-source software to function. From what i understand, they are not in breach of the GPL license if they just invoke the binaries, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.


  • I’ve just watched the installation video and when they install Doom64 from Epic (around the 3:20 Minute mark), it mentioned legendary, a free and open-source alternative to the epic launcher. A bit of further digging we notice that junk-store uses gogdl and nile as well. I am absolutely baffled by this. This closed-source, proprietary $40/p.a. software is a wrapper (albeit a fancy one) for other, open-source launchers.

    Now, i am sure theres a bit more to it than just invoking the binaries of these launchers, but personaly, I consider this shady.


  • The plugin version remains and will remain free according to the husband and wife team behind Junk Store. They’re very easy people to talk to if you need anything at all, and they have a passion for what they’re doing. I think it’s super shitty to call them greedy because they’re offering a paid option alongside the free one.

    I’d like to point out, that the subscription to JS 2.0 is absolutely not there to keep the free version free. In their own FAQ on discord they are already on record stating that if the paid GOG plugin drops of in sales (not usage!), they are going to scale back or even stop maintaining the paid plugin as well as the decky version of JS.