Yeah look, everyone has to find their own way, I’m not trying to make the case that catch & release is going to be better for everyone, and there’s certainly a case to be made for archiving.

The thing that eventually got me was maintaining a big raid array. Lots of heat, power, drives dying every now and again. When it only takes a few minutes to download something and I never go near my bandwidth quota (or it’s unlimited maybe) going to catch & release made a lot of sense. I’m not religious about it but I generally delete things after I’ve listened / watched.

I’ve been catch and release for 5 years or so now.

Archiving is such a huge drain on time / effort / resources.

Yeah it’s a poorly considered generalisation, but the point is you’re not going to be getting emails from your service provider.

Yeah a lot less for a lot better.

Also, people paying for Usenet subscriptions since forever.

I mostly agree with @shadejinx. I would add that when editing the same note on two separate devices syncthing will at least fail kind of gracefully in that you’ll whatever.md will still be there but you’ll see an additional whatever-conflict-hash.md along side it so you can easily fix it up. Synctrayzor for windows will give you a nice notification and UI with which to resolve.

Nextcloud is great but it’s a real behemoth. Loads of stuff you don’t need.

IDK what you mean exactly but I sync between computers and devices just fine.

Well of course they knew which rocks would make the best tools, having been doing it for millennia.

Yeah, politically influenced archaeology.

I hate it when this kind of nonsense is promoted to being an alternative perspective, as though there’s disagreement between researchers.

Yeah honestly ebooks and audiobooks are a solved problem thanks to MAM.

I guess there are exceptions, it’s unknowable but one wonders how long it would’ve taken you to discover nebula some other way.

If you didn’t know of it, then you didn’t need or want it.

This is such a bizarre concept to me.

Why would I want someone to convince me to buy something with a “good pitch” ?

Yes but you watching the ad doesn’t make money for the creator.

That’s what I’m saying.

You can’t force a company to support something. They will just quote an unreasonable price for support.

discontinuing support is in fact breaking it, especially when (as the original post describes) the company deliberately architects things so that they cannot be maintained and arbitrarily cuts support.

On the contrary, the post is describing how they’re maintaining the equipment beyond it’s service life - it’s not broken.

Second […]

There’s no indication that the company that manufactured the microscopes does not offer support? Maybe the guy’s lab just doesn’t want to pay for it.

I make no claims about the moral intent of capitalism

You literally said that discontinuing support is unethical.

I’d say evidence is to the contrary. The internet, for example, is essentially a socialist or even communist endeavour

If you think the last 30 years of internet tech is non-capitalist I don’t know what to say to you.

[…] I’d love to contribute, but in my regular capitalist job […]

Sorry mate, you’ve kind of ranted yourself onto a tangent here.

I’m not advocating capitalism, I’m merely saying that there are reasons why things are the way that they are that commenters here seem unable to consider.

Lemmy has of course inherited reddit’s hatred of corporate profiteering. Of course we should be wary of companies pursuing profit to the detriment of the societies they function within, but that doesn’t mean that all company’s are engaging in greedy profiteering nor that all corporate behavior is an example of greedy profiteering.

I also made the incendiary claim that no one here would open source the software client for the microscope at EoL. I stand by that.

The model in question is the only one we have for oligopolies producing specialist equipment. There are few buyers, few producers, and the R&D costs are high in comparisson to volume sold.

Many commenters are making the absurd and unsupported claim that open sourcing software for older models is somehow “good customer service” that will inspire future sales. IMO this type of claim is the height of arrogance, as though any commenter here has more data and more experience than the management of these companies. As though no one at any of these companies has ever considered that open sourcing their client software might boost future sales. Of course they have considered it, and based on the market research and financial models that they have access to and we do not, they have concluded that whatever they’re doing right now is the best way forward.

As always in this kind of banter, commenters are looking for lazy generalisations on which to base their reasoning. Companies are greedy and bad. Open Source and Socialism is Good. There is always nuance that explains why things are the way they are. Sometimes corporate behavior is the result of excessive greed, but more often there are reasonable explanations.

1. Write blog spam with titles like “5 things …”

Yes absolutely.

Pro tip: choose an appropriate annual budget, divide that amongst different projects in a logical way.

I think you missed my point.

I’m saying that you can’t legislate that abandoned software must become public domain. If you asked a company whether it was abandoned they would just say yes it’s still supported, with a completely impractical price tag for support.

It is sociality absolutely equivalent to software.

We’re not talking about software, the microscope is a product involving research and development, a team of engineers, a production facility, and accompanying software. To say “this software should be open source” is to disregard the product that it’s a part of.

I’m not trying to be condescending but the investment required to produce specialised lab equipment is several orders of magnitude greater than that required to author a book.

And, yeah, actually, giving away free copies is absolutely denying a future sale of that publication.

No it’s not because of the people you give free copies, only an infinitessimal minority would actually buy one. Plus every copy you give away promotes additional sales. Also, IDK anything about you so I don’t intend this to be as condescending as it sounds - but it’s very common to buy a run of 10,000 books just to call yourself a best selling author. Giving away books is pretty meaningless I’m sorry.

If you don’t want to believe any of us, that’s on you, but calling that many people liars tends to be dumber than dammit if you don’t have a good reason to do so.

I do have some specialist knowledge in this area. I advise people on strategic business decisions in the course of my work. I don’t care very much whether you believe me or think I’m dumber than damnit but it’s safe to say that few commenters here have a better understanding of people’s behavior with business & profit decisions than I do.

I absolutely would at least open source any deprecated software like the post is discussing

Then you couldn’t run a viable company in an oligopoly. It’s a mistake to think of this as deprecated software. It’s a component of an earlier product. Microsoft isn’t going to opensource windows 10 just because windows 11 has been released.

That’s my principle, I fully support the right to repair.

No one is impeding the right to repair. Old mate is repairing the computers that run windows 95.

Maybe you don’t think that way. Maybe you want to maximize profits over any other concern.

I don’t think it’s really fair to make assumptions about my character just because I pointed out an alternative perspective that seems completely lost in these threads.

Frankly, assuming that every company you interact with are greedy fat cats is very lazy thinking.

For all you know the producers of this expensive lab equipment are using sales to labs in wealthy research labs to subsidise free microscopes for tertiary institutions in developing nations.

Unfortunately it seems like all you have is a right to repair hammer and you’re trying to hit everything with it even in cases where it doesn’t apply.

This comment is based on the assumption that the company manufacturing the lab equipment is enjoying unreasonable profits, which is not necessarily the case.

You can’t force companies to support software. They will just attach an impractical though reasonable price tag to continued support. “Sure we can support that microscope, it will cost you 2x the price of our new model”.

This would force companies to continuously improve

On the contrary, there’s no money to invest in development of newer models if no one will buy them.

Come come. We both know that handing out free copies of something you authored is not analogous to continued support of lab equipment.

When giving away free copies you’re not denying yourself a future sale.