cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/48806122

A license verification certificate expires and when it expires, Microsoft Office for Mac assumes it’s unlicensed even if it has been fully paid for.

So, any idiot who paid for Office 2019 for Mac “perpetual” will lose access to it next month.

The same will happen with Office 2021 and Office 2024 in the future.

Pirates are unaffected, only who paid for the product gets punished

Good job 👍🏻

  • blitzen@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    The sheer idiocy of this take. Libre Office (or other open source alternatives) haven’t been around forever, and paying for software you use isn’t exactly an outlandish idea.

    I work with Excel a lot for work. I’ve been tempted for a few years to buy a perpetual license for my personal machine because using the same software is just easier. I haven’t, and obviously now I won’t be.

    But don’t put down paying a reasonable price for a perpetual license for software you use often. It’s thinking like that that’s gotten us all-subscription options.

    • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      The sheer idiocy of this take. Libre Office (or other open source alternatives) haven’t been around forever, and paying for software you use isn’t exactly an outlandish idea.

      Just ignoring your ad-hominem… Libre’s around for 15 years. Ok, if you’re forced to use that shit due to work, you have not much choice. Except another job :) As I haven’t worked for the last 3 decades, I don’t know how much of that shitty MS still goes around. Paying, of course. But not for microsoft or most of the other US-corpos that destroy everything they touch. And even if i would be forced to pay, there are tons of grey-market OEM-keys. Get Office for some cents. If that goes extinct, buy current version for some cents. You’re legit (MS doesn’t care anyway, and never has) and cheap. Also if you’re long enough in the market to say Libre’s not been around forever, you also know that MS regularly kills products no matter how “perpetual” your license was.

      It’s thinking like that that’s gotten us all-subscription options.

      Nope. It is, has been, and will be just ignorance. People who don’t know better and/or don’t WANT to know better and/or simply don’t care at all. The sum of my subscription-costs comes down to vpn, usenet-indexer and usenet and the rest are monthly donations to several FOSS-projects. It’s either lifetime-deals (expecting them to end way before MY lifetime ends) or no deals. Lifetime-deals are always a gamble though.

      If people willingly pay for netflix, spotify or leased cars…well, you will own nothing, rent everything and be happy. There’s a reason they can regularly raise prices and still not loose a significant portion of customers. I probably spent six-figures on steam and bandcamp/other-music-sources. Not one cent on spotify&co. And if i couldn’t afford to buy, I’d pirate it. But surely would not RENT stuff.

      And there has been numerous studies over the last decades as to how piracy does NOT affect sales in any noteworthy amount.

      So, how is my fuck-us-bigtech-or-pirate-stance the culprit for all-subscription-options? I’m the minority :-)