After receiving unwanted flack from astute critics, an only-partially awake tech normie had recorded a diatribe lamenting how he just has no choice, woe is me, but to continue to use software which continues to dictate his operations. Jody Bruchon’s rationalizations boil down to strained analogies, bargaining (the third stage of grief), false equivalencies and self-guided assertions. The text is pulled from the video transcription, but the video itself can be found here if you’re looking for a good laugh.
In the comment section on my windows 11 must be stopped video i had a lot of comments from people saying that i didn’t have to agree to the windows license agreement ‘yeah, you don’t own windows it’s licensed to you and you can have that license revoked at any time by microsoft but hey man you agreed to it’. Well let me use an analogy that might illustrate the problem with this. If i offer you a hamburger or a hot dog you get to choose between eating a hamburger or eating a hot dog and you make your choice and you eat the food of your choice and that’s the end of it. If i offer you a hamburger and a hot dog but if you pick hot dog i tell you that you’ll get shot in the face well now your hot dog comes with a free execution. So what are you going to pick? Technically you have a choice you can choose hot dog and then be shot in the face and die but that’s not really a choice is it? Yes it’s a technical choice but it’s not a choice if you want to continue to survive and exist and be a living human being. In much the same way software terms of service licensing the whole ‘you are licensed not sold’ the fact that there’s no legal ownership of the copy of the software that you don’t own what you pay for well, you can choose not to agree to these terms much like you can choose not to agree to the click wrap agreement on adobe premiere pro or whatever but when you make that choice when you choose not to accept the license agreement you also don’t get to use that software.
Already he frames the decision to reject proprietary software as though it is death itself. If you made it far enough to be presented with a EULA prompt, the situation has already been preceded by a long chain of poor decisions. In reality, exclusivity is weaponized by monopolists to increase the costs of refusal. By caving and going along, you’re only fueling their desired snowball effect.
And a hamburger-hotdog dichotomy isn’t entirely fair. Choosing to use libre technology is more like eating vegetables sourced from a community garden. While the nonfree cattle elect to bloat themselves on the aforementioned street vendor food.
So what happens if you choose not to use windows? Well we’re going to assume that mac os is the same because the truth is mac os and windows the license agreements have very similar provisions. It’s licensed not sold the you don’t own your copy we can pull your license blah blah blah. So both of them have equally onerous terms of service or license agreements or whatever you want to call them. So linux would be your only other option. So what happens if you pick instead of windows or mac os? You go linux and you refuse to accept the windows license agreement. No quickbooks. No adobe premiere. No adobe illustrator. No adobe photoshop. These are major pro applications that you can’t use. Oh wait did you say microsoft office? No microsoft office. You have libreoffice. But guess what? It’s not compatible with microsoft office. Guess what else is a problem? Outlook. No access to outlook in office? Well people who use outlook might be sending an outlook rich text format and you’ll have to go find a thing in thunderbird to work around it and all that. This is a more general problem with ‘well you could have just chosen not to use windows and to use linux’. That’s fine and great but an operating system and a cluster of programs that come with it do not make a complete system. The problem is the application environment. The applications that you use are the most important thing on your system.
He conflates terms of service with whether or not an operating system is proprietary. No, the fact that the terms can be so egregious is enabled precisely because Windows and Mac are both nonfree. Here, he also lists out his anchor software, almost entirely consisting of Adobe and Microsoft prisonware. Stop saving your documents in proprietary formats. Advise your mail sender that they’ve erroneously sent their message in a specialized format which isn’t universally readable by everyone (how often does one even receive richtext mail?). What are you even doing in Illustrator that can’t be done in GIMP?
Now granted firefox and chrome you can get those for linux all day long you can get all kinds of web browsers. But web browsers are not what people who actually have to get real work done need to use. If you want a good video editor, if you want a professional grade video editor or audio editor or digital audio workstation, you’re not going to get those on linux. There are none. At least not that i am aware of. I am aware of many products on linux. The live’s video editing system. The uh caden live open shot. Yes, these are video editors but guess what i’ve tried them all they’re not very good.
I have seen nothing in your videos to suggest that you need any of the secret sauce capabilities of the aforementioned proprietary editors. In fact, your format could totally be handled by filming your rant and then splicing the bits together with ffmpeg (in terminal, like gigachad does). The entire notion that web videos need to be elaborately edited is a recent phenomenon to appease short attention spans and centralized video host algorithms.
A lot of them are imovie level. Lives looked like oh hey wow a non-linear editor that looks like maybe it might be more on par with permit. It’s not. Light works oh my god don’t even get me started on light works and light works. They did the whole open source thing but then they sort of backed away and became difficult and frankly i found light works to be very difficult to work with. If you want to edit video your options pretty much boil down to final cut pro 10 or adobe premiere pro. There’s also davinci resolve but i don’t think that’s available for linux either i haven’t looked.
In the video, he does later look to find that it has been released for Linuxes, but electing to use this would only prolongue the issue by failing to attack the source of the problem.
There are a few programs but they’re all mac os and windows so yeah you’re right i could just agree to not say yes to the license agreement that’s fine. I have that choice but guess what? I’m locked out of all these proprietary applications that are actually the only good solutions to get professional work done in certain fields. I’m also locked out of certain applications that are only made for windows and not for linux and that don’t run under wine. So while this choice exists you’re also talking about the video you’re watching right now potentially not being possible. I think k.rita or creta however you want to pronounce it may be one of the most professional looking replacements that you can get but is not photoshop. Creda is not photoshop or illustrator. You know inkscape is not illustrator. At all. There’s just all kinds of things that are missing from these open source solutions and until they catch up, if they ever catch up, they’re not going to be suitable replacements. You lock yourself out of professional software. You can’t do that professional work and this is the bigger problem. you can’t run premiere pro on wine. You can’t run a lot of things that are professional. Online quickbooks. Not online? Guess what the standard is for accounting for corporate accounting. It’s quickbooks that’s the standard that is the accounting package that the vast majority of businesses use. Oh oh you want to use sage 50 previously known as peachtree instead of quickbooks? Guess what you’re not going to get that to work on wine either. That’s a squirrely piece of software by the way. There’s all kinds of stuff that doesn’t work right under a linux system and i hate hate hate hate to say this but it’s the biggest problem with linux. It’s not that linux itself is some kind of terrible system. it’s great. there are a lot of wonderful things about open source software in linux but if you need premiere pro or final cut pro you can’t use linux.
Slave to your software. It’s not that you lock yourself out of such software, but they lock you out by refusing to free their source or otherwise make the program available on other environments. This idea that free software just “needs to catch up” is fallacious thinking insinuating that it is somehow “behind”. If you keep thinking like that, you might just end up like this guy.
And if you do you have to have another machine that runs that proprietary os lying around to run it on anyway or run it in a virtual machine well guess what? You ever try to edit video you know you need a lot of hardware acceleration for that garbage now you know that encoding is an extremely intensive process right? Emulating or virtualizing video editing is a disaster and you’re still running the proprietary os under the virtual machine. It’s not a viable option. I don’t know what else to say. The people that are saying it’s a choice that you can choose not to run windows well yes, but you can also choose not to run software that runs on windows. You can choose to not be a part of the environment that the vast majority of computers use and interface with. You can also choose to live in a cabin in the woods.
Oh, one sure can heh
But you won’t have internet or telephone or electricity that isn’t solar. You can choose to live in the middle of nowhere and have no infrastructure and be disconnected from society and guess what? It’ll be really hard to participate in society.
Oh no, what to do without soyciety?!
You can choose not to have a smartphone.
Also yes lol
But as you choose not to have a smartphone guess what? As everybody has standardized on text messaging as it’s now become to the point where you have to have a smartphone to set up two-factor authentication just to get an account on a website nowadays.
This is a clear sign that the websites you use are shit. Stop using shit websites and the problem goes away.
That everything assumes you have a smartphone or a cell phone that can do text messaging at a minimum and that you always have access to that and you totally won’t ever lose access to your own phone number, what are you going to do if you don’t have a smartphone? Guess what it’s going to be awful hard to set up a gmail account.
Why would anyone do a foolish thing like that?
If google demands that you provide a cell phone number it’s going to be awful hard to set up facebook or twitter, any modern social media account if google requires. Or facebook requires or whoever requires that you provide a telephone number.
You’re seriously crying about not being able to access FBIbook and Twitter? You need to move past that. Let me help you find your way to the fediverse 🠲
In addition to just feeding them an email address you can’t live without a smartphone today without cutting yourself off from a huge chunk of society. Much the same way you can run linux instead of windows.
Calling and texting are both possible without using any kind of proprietary software or even a physical slavephone at all. I have written about this on numerous occasions.
But you’re cutting yourself off from that professional software that is only available on windows or mac os. The point is you don’t necessarily always have a choice if you run proprietary operating systems. You gain access to the software that runs on top of them. But if you don’t you’re cut off. And if your job or just any way that you make money or get things done requires that, proprietary software you don’t really have a choice do you? Every day that you operate with linux only guess what? You can’t make money you can’t do those tasks.
You seriously use your personal devices for work? Strict separation of private and professional digital life is like opsec 101, come on, guy. Also, it is possible and even preferable to make money outside of the proprietary technology industry. You should try it some time. Your occupation doesn’t have to be your identity.
You might have a substitute that is unfortunately somewhat incompatible or inferior in some way or many ways but you don’t have that gold standard software. It’s a major problem it needs to be dealt with. I don’t have the answers for this. I think however and what i would propose is that someone needs to foster some kind of an open source foundation of some sort of non-profit and get everyone else on board to feed some money into that so they can hire programmers to write and work on professional replacements for these software packages. If there really is enough interest in free and open source software that we want to get away from windows and mac os and move towards linux, bsd, whatever maybe what we need is some kind of a corporate structure that can take donations, and enough people that support open source to pool their money into that and support actually replacing premiere pro and illustrator and quickbooks and these other pro applications that don’t work anywhere else, to replace them with a suitable open source easily available, cross-compilable, forkable, updatable you know serviceable long after the original developers are dead piece of software for open source stuff. And you know what? If it gets to that point i know i only have like 6,000 subscribers, i say only but it was like 1,400 two weeks ago, but if it gets to that point if enough people are behind me on this i would be willing to go through all of the pain and struggle that it takes to set up such a business entity.
No, please, the last thing libre software needs are more corporate interests mucking things up. All that so that you don’t have to relearn how to edit video or track your finances? The solutions are already out there but they just don’t have the infantalized buttons and GUI layouts that you’re clutching so hard to.
The biggest problem is that if you set up a business entity like this you, can’t really accept any kind of outside investment that comes with conditions because open source software you let it all go for free. You are giving the product away. You are literally getting money from other people to not charge money for the product which is a funny thing to think about. But that’s the only realistic solution. You need an actual corporation that professionally develops professional software and focuses on that and only that. What we have right now is all these other software packages that just have people who do it in their spare time or people that have devoted a significant amount of their time but one developer cannot write a premier pro. One developer cannot write a quickbooks. Although you can write.sql ledger which requires installation on a web server so that’s immediately out. For the vast majority of normal users this is not going to work. Anyway, I’m rambling. Bottom line is that sometimes you don’t have a choice. Sometimes you have to use proprietary software and operating systems. No, sometimes you don’t get the option to say no to that licensing agreement. Because you know what? At the end of the day somebody somewhere has to pay your bills, otherwise you don’t survive. And what do you do then? Take this house out of here. Take this camera away. Take away the electricity. And the water. And the trash and the sewer and all that. Take the car. Guess what? You’re not watching this video, you’re not hearing me speak and i can’t help you.
Lots of misconceptions here about how much of household name free software is developed, by whom and the ways that some do successfully monetize their efforts (Hint: it’s not selling the end product, but the services surrounding it). And TIL: People who exclusively use free software can’t view this video like I just did?
The whole thing comes across as though Jody is stuck in a rut, unwilling to learn new tools, as he can feel the constrictions of the walled garden continue to clasp down around him, but not understand why. Only a person still enslaved to Windows would take the time to make video rants about how Windows 11 is “ruining” Windows, as though it wasn’t already terrible. And, in a similar vein, only a person still enslaved to nonfree applications would take the time to make a video decrying the solutions for not being similar enough.
GooTube and other video sites, but especially GooTube, are littered with channels like his. Where the uploader will cry about how his proprietary software is mistreating him or that the next version is intruducing some new malicious antifeature (say it isn’t so!). Or how to “defang” Mac or Windows or Chrome or whichever other terrible vice they find themselves chained to. A word of wisdom to all of you burgeoning techtubers; you don’t “fix” an abuser, you leave them.
