ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Google G-Drive

They don't want our files. They just want to rent software to us. If we buy software, we only pay once. If we rent, we pay yearly.

I got caught when an accounting program went from purchase to rent. The purchase price was cheap but after a few years they decided rent was better. The yearly rent was almost as much as the purchase price. When I didn't rent, they "quit supporting" the software and it was pretty much useless.

Imagine the money they can make if every program on your computer has to be rented - operating system, firewall, anti-virus, browser, email, photo-shop, movie player, music player, etc.

Now, I'm a believer in open source. If it doesn't run on Ubuntu, I will live without it.

I was under the impression, that the Internet was for FREE dissemination of information, not for big companies to come in and say "this is how it is going to be from now on, like it or get off our Internet"
That was NOT what the Internet was intended to be for.

Trumpy's right on the money.
My experience with big companies and big goverments is that they always end up applying "the golden rule".

It goes like this:
"We have all the gold; therefore we make all the rules".

The internet is "free" like TV is "free". It is free as long as you don't mind looking at a lot of advertising.
The software itself is a huge cash cow.
That is why I stayed on W98 so long. You can find w98 apps, sealed in the, shrink wrap, on Ebay for a couple bucks a disk. These are usually corporate additions or OEM packs that never got used. I just got my first XP pro, bundled with a $100 system that I bought used from gearxs.com (2.8gz P4 Compaq). I paid another $10 for the original setup disks since all it had was the COA sticker. Still a great bargain.
If you don't feel sorry for Bill Gates, there are some warez newsgroups that have MS apps for free.
(alt.binaries.warez.win95-apps)

Have any Google services gone pay yet? We've already stopped purchasing licenses for MS Office at work, and there are two opinions of what we should do next... Those who want to encourage people to use Google Docs, and those in my "camp" would rather use OpenOffice. Either way, you can be sure that Google is doing a ton of data mining with anything you send them. Why else do you think they would offer these services for free?

I would recommend open source software before stopping in at a warez site. Often times the software is better, and you don't have to worry about any copyright infringement.