Foster Hangdaan

There’s a bunch of mods for closed-source games on Codeberg such as Minecraft mods. As long as the mod itself is free and open-source, then there seems to be no problem.

Steam is not a subscription service

Steam provides a cloud service. Not dissimilar to other subscription-based services. Had they been using AWS, they would also have been affected by the outage, resulting in Steam also being mentioned in the headline. So it’s just as relevant as the others.

you’ll never own a piece of software by buying it in a video game store.

Sure, I’m both granted a license on both Steam or GOG, but the crucial difference is still about offline access. If GOG stopped existing tomorrow, I’d still be able to install, and play, all my GOG games. The same cannot be said for Steam. Which one, then, grants the most ownership? License or no license.

It IS a scam since a lot of subscription services do not make it clear that the buyer is only granted limited access, and not ownership of the product.

Just last year, due to legal reasons, Steam placed a notice on their cart page stating that purchases only grant a license—much to the surprise of some Steam users. Steam has been around for 20+ years, and it took a piece of legislation to force the company to inform their buyers of this very important fact. It is clear that they would rather have misinformed customers, much like in a scam.

What’s even funnier are the people who spend lots of money on subscription services to own nothing. This outage just demonstrates who really owns their purchases.

You can try out Peer Calls. It’s a peer-to-peer video and text chat that uses WebRTC, and is very lightweight. You can either use the flagship instance or self-host your own. One of the disadvantages is that text messages are not stored and are lost when the chat room is closed.

Ah, great minds think alike 😄. I also began to mirror several emulation-related projects ever since Nintendo started its takedowns.

One under-the-radar project that I believe is worth preserving is the collection of Pokemon game decompilations by Pret. Just to list a few:

• Pokemon Red/Blue Decompilation
• Pokemon Crystal Decompilation
• Pokemon Emerald Decompilation

Transmission’s minimal features is what I like about it.