DoD has been doing site licensing for Oracle for at least 25 years. On my project, we found a site license that covered our selection & use of Oracle back around 2001/2002. So NO NEWS HERE.

I think that it does, because most people in history bought a PC from an OEM, and the rest of us could get an OEM copy if we wanted to. Having been a Mac user up into the 040 days, and then slightly again after that, I did always appreciate the fact that Apple wouldn't even in theory hassle you about making your own copies of the System disks. But: Apple wasn't giving you anything that it didn't make sense for them to give you, and they for most of history they've charged a substantial price premium and provided inferior performance. Even today, when they actually have impressive hardware for a time longer than the moment the G5 had in the sun, they still only excel up into the mid-range, but I have to admit they're killing it there.

I paid $100 for the last version of Windows I bought (the absolutely peak Windows 7 Pro x64, for what it's worth) and I got a legit system builder's license as I was building a potato of Theseus which has evolved into the big black cube-shaped 5900X I'm using now. I could run that Windows 7 in a VM today if I want to, and I occasionally do when I need to run some kind of programmer or something — just attach a hub to the VM to solve all the awkwardness. But I haven't run either Windows or MacOS except under protest since I discovered AmigaOS and Unix at nearly the same time, in 1991.

It seems to me that there is a general lack of sanity in the world. This is only one of the most personally irritating personifications.

That's fair in general, but that still doesn't mean that you should chase every CVE immediately... I know, see above

Both things

I think where it breaks down is when LG involves a unrelated third party in this case McAfee.

Without a site license, one would expect each Service and each Program to negotiate a separate contract with Oracle (or any other software vendor.) Enterprise site licensing is pretty common, both in government circles and in industry, with savings over a collection of individual purchases. So there's nothing unusual about this.

Socialize the losses, privatize the profits.

They could just hire people to do it and then the fruits of that labor could be available to everyone as open source. As an added bonus we wouldn't be constantly paying for the profitability of private companies for no particularly good reason. And we wouldn't be creating billionaires that are going to undermine our democracy.

But something something socialism so here we are... All of us stuck with shit software that constantly spies on us

It has nothing to do with being cowards, they are robots. It's a case of saving a little money at the expense of being excluded from a lot of money.

Piracy laws are very effective... for curbing intentional piracy in businesses because they have too much to lose to break laws like these and they are basically robots with instructions to follow the law.

But they won't outlaw these, what they'd do is prohibit companies that use them from government work/contracts and the government gives away WAY too much of our money to give that up.

LG slips McAfee adware via Windows Update. What a collaboration of scumbags!

But from what I understand they don't allow you to do what LG did. It's explicitly forbidden in the guidelines for a Windows certified driver.

I don't know what made LG think they could get away with this nonsense. Every single tech YouTuber on the planet has gone crazy reporting this.

"TDS" is what you blame when you don't want to address the actual content.

My favorite is the times it's told people to make a right angle turn off the side of a bridge. That's not an instruction very likely to cause harm because there's not an exit there for some idiot to take, but it's especially hilarious because there's no excuse for that.

PS2s didn't come with HDDs so devs couldn't rationally require one.

Most games after that install