food for thought: code bloat

[tellurium]

People who complain about bloat wasting resources and reducing performance don't understand the goal of the system

 Our capitalist society is based on convincing others to pay you for the goods and services you produce.

Yes, tell us about bad capitalist "system". Perhaps also mention a good communist / socialist "system"? How lovely, careful and tender it is, with no consumerism and careful to the people and the planet.

[brucehoult]

Yes, tell us about bad capitalist "system". Perhaps also mention a good communist / socialist "system"? How lovely, careful and tender it is, with no consumerism and careful to the people and the planet.

I'm very happy to see so much pushback here against my Marxist countryman!

Voluntary exchange is the best way to organise an economy, and widely-distributed private ownership of resources and land (*including* endangered environments and habitats) is the best way to preserve them.

[brucehoult]

Oooh politics. You don't look good by assuming that engineers won't spot the fallacy in

• X is bad
• therefore Y must be good
• where Y isn't not(X)

Law of Excluded Middle.

You decide for yourself what to do with your time and your property, or someone else tells you what to do with them. There are literally no other options.

The label placed on the "someone else" and their central planning is irrelevant.

[Kjelt]

private ownership of resources and land (*including* endangered environments and habitats) is the best way to preserve them.

There is no ownership of land.
At best you are a temporary caretaker of the land.
The sooner humanity realizes that and handles like it, preferably to pass it on better than when the person got it, the better.

[Nominal Animal]

Voluntary exchange is the best way to organise an economy, and widely-distributed private ownership of resources and land (*including* endangered environments and habitats) is the best way to preserve them.

According to historical record, this is true.  Add limited competition (i.e., encourage competition but discourage or ban monopolies and cartels), and you'll get even better results for the humans involved.  It also does not exclude commons.

Things that are still somewhat open questions –– because they heavily involve cultural details –– includes things we consider basic necessities: water, energy, waste management, and so on.  Natural monopolies.

At best you are a temporary caretaker of the land.

Isn't that exactly what ownership (of land) means?  It is to me.


I am personally very interested in the way open source has changed software industry.  Make no mistake, even open source developers need to get paid to live; but fortunately at least some companies do see investment into the projects they rely on as useful and necessary.  Mostly, it is the short-sightedness management that is the major barrier; they just cannot see the benefit of making 20x profit in five years compared to 1x profit in one year, especially if it involves making less than 1x profit in the first year.

Personally, I like the model where a client requiring customization or completely custom software, agrees to an open source license.  The client will always get full sources and documentation to the project, and will be able to continue its development even with a different set of developers.  The developers can reuse the code under the same or a compatible license.  Sometimes there are details, especially business logic that is better kept private/proprietary –– I've even signed NDAs for these ––, but there is no reason to avoid that, or to apply the same license for the entire project.  You just keep the boundary clear.

The state of large software projects in Finland is atrocious.  It is assumed that most projects never produce any kind of useful results, and when a project fails, the leaders don't take any flak.  The same managers just shift to a different project, with zero care that millions of euros just got wasted on nothing.  This should never have been allowed to become the 'norm'; it is much worse, overall, than any single 'crash' could be, because it is continuous loss of resources to players who now design their offers to public projects in a way that allows them to garner a nice profit while failing the project.
It is like code bloat on steroids, really.

Granted, I'm a toolmaker, and not a policymaker.  I like to do things that let people do stuff better and more efficiently than before; and I prefer and like it when both myself and my client benefit from the interaction, even more than I prefer and like personal profit.  So maybe that colors my view overmuch.

[Nominal Animal]

I like the idea of enlightened self-interest.  Sure, it's a murky concept because self-interest can be understood in different ways and different contexts.  You could say its basis is the golden rule and deferred gratification.  As I see it, identity politics and shortsightedness (especially in management!) and moral posturing are very harmful and common behaviour patterns in Western societies right now, and I consider enlightened self-interest an ethical antidote.

As to code bloat, it does make a codebase annoying to work with.  Dependency hell, all sorts of process and library interactions producing unwanted behaviour, and so on... Refactoring and shaving off the bloat every now and then does help keep the maintenance costs down, methinks.  So, to me, removing code bloat is a win-win for everyone.

Or maybe I'm just a one-trick pony who applies the same rules to everything, I dunno. 

[madires]

Another aspect of code bloat is security. Instead of writing a few functions for a specific purpose you simply use a lib since it's less work. Remember log4shell (log4j)? How many applications are still running without the patched log4j version?

[SiliconWizard]

Yes yes. Funny thing is, it's not even always less work to use a third-party library. Between learning how to use it, handling dependencies and updates, and all the wasted time when you actually run into a bug, it's not clear at all. At least for the large number of libraries that are commonly used for trivial tasks. (Not talking about the potentially more complex stuff, which I'd venture represents only a tiny fraction of all the third-party code being used overall.)

Beyond the waste of resources (which is very real) - hardware resources and power - the more code a given system contains, and the harder it is to make it secure and, well, just even correct.
Let alone actually being able to demonstrate that it is both. (Oh good lord, what I just wrote is probably an "insult" to many. Demonstrate what?) Who cares, right, it does make quick money.

But reality and the laws of physics always end up victorious. Something you can be sure of.
If we keep acting as children, we will be treated as such. Either by people with more power than we have, or by the above laws. Just a thought.

[Berni]

Using a lot of libraries in a software project is not necessarily a bad thing.

Some projects are just so complex that implementing a lot of it yourself would take too much time. The developers of the library probably also put a lot of work and knowledge in that library to make it perform well. You don't want to reinvent the wheel after all.

But yes indeed just slapping libraries in there willy nilly can quickly lead to dependency bloat where lots of huge libraries are in there just to do this one simple thing. Same for not taking the time to learn how the library works and ending up using the library in a hacky way, likely making the library do a lot of unnecessary work in the background to waste resources.

Also it is hard to tell how good a library is when you come across it. You only truly see how usable or performant it is once you tried using it, but at that point you already wrote code that does stuff so you don't want to rewrite it for another library and you know how to use this library now so you will be tempted to use it on the next project too. This leads nicely into stuffing in big bloated libraries to do one simple thing that could be done using a single 50 line function.

[brucehoult]

Some projects are just so complex that implementing a lot of it yourself would take too much time. The developers of the library probably also put a lot of work and knowledge in that library to make it perform well. You don't want to reinvent the wheel after all.

Yeah, such as this library in node.js's NPM repository:

Code: [Select]

module.exports = leftpad;
function leftpad(str, len, ch) {
  str = String(str);
  var i = -1;
  if (!ch && ch != 0) ch = ' ';
  len = len - str.length;
  while (++i < len) {
    str = ch + str;
  }
  return str
}

On March 22 2016 a large part of the internet went down because the author of the above difficult to duplicate and super-efficiently written module deleted it (and others) from NPM after a dispute involving a company (Kik) claiming trademark rights over the name of one of his other packages and NPM management siding with the trademark claimant.

[Nominal Animal]

Some projects are just so complex that implementing a lot of it yourself would take too much time. The developers of the library probably also put a lot of work and knowledge in that library to make it perform well. You don't want to reinvent the wheel after all.

In that case, you should support the library, however.
If you work on a commercial product, it is an investment into your own business.
If you work on a noncommercial product, show your support by letting the upstream know you're happy for the work they do, and when you find a problem (or one of your downstream users reports a problem), you filter and check the bug report and pass it upstream –– or better yet, investigate it and provide suggested patches with full problem description upstream.

This is just enlightened self-interest, in my opinion.

Also it is hard to tell how good a library is when you come across it. You only truly see how usable or performant it is once you tried using it

Exactly; which is one of the reasons I myself try out all kinds of stuff as a "hobby".

Sure, it means you have an archive of hundreds to thousands of test programs, and you get only-a-little-better-than-superficial opinion based on those test cases, but at least it is preliminary experience, not trusting others opinions to reflect reality.

Years ago, in the early years of GnuTLS, I did exactly that because I prefer to have alternatives (then, to OpenSSL), and ended up submitting some suggestions and patches.  So, it is a good way to contribute back to upstreams you might need later on, too.

I wish other experienced devs did the same, too: it would be one way to shave off the bloat without rocking the boat overmuch.

[Berni]

Yeah, such as this library in node.js's NPM repository:

Ah yes i remember that one.

This is one of the reasons why i like it when a languages standard set of libraries includes a lot of basic string/array manipulation functions. At first i was of the opinion that this is not the languages job. "Pfft why do you need a function for lowercasing a string, this takes like a few lines of C code, What is this training wheels for babies?" But later on found they are indeed nice to have. Prevents these little functions from being scattered around and copy pasted or included from various places. Everyone uses the same functions to do the manipulation so it is easier to read other peoples code too. If you have a function that returns the extension for a filename, you know it does that from the function name alone (even tho the actual string manipulation it does could be done with other more basic functions).

In that case, you should support the library, however.
If you work on a commercial product, it is an investment into your own business.
If you work on a noncommercial product, show your support by letting the upstream know you're happy for the work they do, and when you find a problem (or one of your downstream users reports a problem), you filter and check the bug report and pass it upstream –– or better yet, investigate it and provide suggested patches with full problem description upstream.

This is just enlightened self-interest, in my opinion.

I could see the management being furious about someone submitting a git pull request for a library fix that there employee developed during work hours that they are paying for. Reasons ranging from "Why should we be paying to fix bugs in some guys crappy library" to "This is company property, what is this GPL you are whining about" to "We don't want the competition to use OUR fix". This is probably part of the same reason of why service manuals don't have schematics anymore.

I am not that much about Open Source i use Windows even. But i do provide feedback to open source projects when i have something valuable to share. If i fixed a bug or added a feature to an open source project i share it with the developers. It doesn't cost me anything to share it and the developers are pretty much always happy to see it.

[madires]

I could see the management being furious about someone submitting a git pull request for a library fix that there employee developed during work hours that they are paying for. Reasons ranging from "Why should we be paying to fix bugs in some guys crappy library" to "This is company property, what is this GPL you are whining about" to "We don't want the competition to use OUR fix". This is probably part of the same reason of why service manuals don't have schematics anymore.

A long time ago a common idea of companies writing software was to maintain in-house libs for all the little things always needed. Today many simply use open source libs instead. Another case of privatizing profits and socializing losses?

[Nominal Animal]

I could see the management being furious about someone submitting a git pull request for a library fix that there employee developed during work hours that they are paying for. Reasons ranging from "Why should we be paying to fix bugs in some guys crappy library" to "This is company property, what is this GPL you are whining about" to "We don't want the competition to use OUR fix".

That's exactly where the understanding of how open source works comes in.  I have, and will point out to that management person that that means that "We don't want the fixes our competition does to the core parts that we too use, in OUR products; we want ours to be crappier."  If they start getting red, I'll calmly explain how the ecosystem works for a company whose life depends on profit.  The key is that only an idiot who no self-respecting shareholder would hire into management would value small short-term savings over huge long-term profits.

Then again, it is absolutely ridiculous how management-enrichment schemes that hurt the company bottom line are tolerated by shareholders in general.

I am not that much about Open Source i use Windows even. But i do provide feedback to open source projects when i have something valuable to share. If i fixed a bug or added a feature to an open source project i share it with the developers. It doesn't cost me anything to share it and the developers are pretty much always happy to see it.

Like I said, doing that, and fostering a culture that favours developers doing that, is just plain enlightened self-interest.

If there is management who fails to see how supporting the foundations of the products that the company provides for profit is bolstering and safeguarding that business model, then it is literally a shareholder/owner problem: that management needs to be kicked out, before they run the company to the ground.

Here in Finland, management is The Problem.  The lowly product line workers could do anything, it's just that the management cannot pull their heads out of each others asses to run a business for even a second.

That's a major source of societal structural bloat: middle management.  Whenever you hire a new middle manager, they want to grow their own domain, regardless of how it affects the entire organization.  Unless you cut that fat out regularly, you end up like large Finnish organizations, where you have 2×-3× the people in the middle management pushing paper and internal reports and having meetings over coffee or lunch, compared to the number of people working on the actual products and paying projects.

[Berni]

A lot of people don't understand what open source is.

Lots of companies perceive open source as a threat rather than a help. Classical example of this is Nintendo. They have a huge legal department suing people left right and center for doing pretty much anything to anything with a Nintendo badge on it. According to them you are not even allowed to share video footage of there games running on legit hardware. They try to shutdown people developing emulators for there systems (but fail to do so because it is not ilegal). They even threw DMCA claims at YouTube channels that show how to use emulation. There was a effort to decompile SuperMario64 back into C code. They threatened legal action to it too, even tho it contained no copyrighted data from the original ROM cartridge (Just reimplemented C source and a tool that extracts needed assets like models,textures..etc from a dump of the ROM cartridge that you have to supply yourself). Then after all of that Nintendo starts selling a mini novelty SNES console that was found to use an open source emulator to run the games on a ARM SoC.

As for management of large companies always tends to suck since they almost all just work to please the shareholders. This usually revolves around presenting nice green financial numbers for every quarter. Shareholders treat it like any other stock, the moment they see the numbers looking bad they get the hell out of there and start selling off shares, causing the stock price to drop, causing other shareholders to start selling too..etc.. Sure the shareholders want long term growth, but at the same time they are scared of ending up holding the hot potato of a failing company. So management actually has to prioritize short term gains to keep the shareholders on board. This is a crappy business model that is unfortunately very popular.

Some hierarchical management is required once the company gets large enough since the top management can only have so much bandwidth to deal with things. It is more that the wrong kind of people tend to end up in management roles. In small companies you usually have the founders running everything, those usually are very knowledgeable in the field because they had to be to get started. But then as the company grows the extra management positions tend to get filled with people who have no field expertise, so they tend to make bad business decisions when it comes to any technical topic. To make things worse is that the more incompetent people are usually the ones that fight the most for those promotions. The engineers want to get promoted to senior engineer or lead engineer but not into actual management where they would spend there time shuffling papers around rather than getting real work done. Then once they get really big they start specifically hiring people with MBA degrees into management. Those not only have no technical background but also have no idea what the company just arrived at actually does.

[Bruce Abbott]

A lot of people don't understand what open source is.

Lots of companies perceive open source as a threat rather than a help. Classical example of this is Nintendo. They have a huge legal department suing people left right and center for doing pretty much anything to anything with a Nintendo badge on it. According to them you are not even allowed to share video footage of there games running on legit hardware. They try to shutdown people developing emulators for there systems (but fail to do so because it is not ilegal). They even threw DMCA claims at YouTube channels that show how to use emulation. There was a effort to decompile SuperMario64 back into C code. They threatened legal action to it too, even tho it contained no copyrighted data from the original ROM cartridge

Nintendo wrote the code for their games, so it belongs to them. They make money from it by selling the game cartridges and the consoles to play them on. Any method used to get around that potentially loses sales for Nintendo. How is that an example of open source 'helping' them?

The reason Nintendo try to stop people making emulators is obvious - because they know people will use them to play pirated games. 'Decompiling' a game into C is effectively the same as simply copying the game - which is illegal and immoral. The game is their creation so they have the right to maintain control over its IP. Open source is not the same as free, but when the source code is out there it's hard to police your IP. Nintendo trying to do so is perfectly within their right. If they don't it could be claimed that they have abandoned it - so they have to police it. There is still money to be made from SuperMario64, but if you let people copy it freely and run it on an emulator then Nintendo get nothing. Why do you hate capitalism?

Your 'classical example' of companies perceiving open source as a threat is actually a classic example of freeloaders taking stuff that doesn't belong to them, to the detriment of the hard-working producers of it. You think SuperMario64 is a great game and you want to play it? Buy the game and the official machine to play it on. Don't want to part with the money? Write your own great game. Oh, but that's too hard? Now you know why you should pay for it.


 

[Nominal Animal]

Nintendo wrote the code for their games, so it belongs to them. They make money from it by selling the game cartridges and the consoles to play them on. Any method used to get around that potentially loses sales for Nintendo. How is that an example of open source 'helping' them?

The same way availability of books free of charge increases the sale of books by the same author, as discovered by Baen Books' Baen Free Library.  It was founded in 1999 by Eric Flint, an author himself, and publisher Jim Baen.

The reason Nintendo try to stop people making emulators is obvious - because they know people will use them to play pirated games.

Yet, there is no actual data backing that "knowing".  In fact, actual experiments and statistics points to the opposite.

Except for a few bad apples who try to make a profit off others (by clandestinely using open source in their commercial projects, usually breaking the license; or by making fake cartridges or copies of games and selling them), a typical "pirate" actually spends more money on games than those who do not "pirate" at all.  Companies didn't ditch DRM because they decided to be lenient towards "pirates"; they did so because it hurt their sales.

But by all means, do take your personal beliefs stemming from stereotypes and other peoples beliefs as "knowledge" and "facts", and completely ignore what results have been discovered by actual independent research.  No, I will not give you any sources or links, because that just leads to the social game of "if you listen to that source, you must be X"; you have to do the research yourself.  The question is, are you willing to risk having your "knowledge and facts" be overturned by actual research, or not?

A bit over two decades ago, I was just like you.  Then, I hired a lawyer to teach me how open source licenses, and copyright licenses in general.  I learned how open source actually works for a company working on ordinary profit-making principles.  Baen Free Library did something very similar to creative literature.  Both of us are still bombarded with arguments from people who insist that their core beliefs trump practical experience, and that what we found to be true, could not be true because their beliefs.  It can be horribly tiring, I suspect something like being Dave on Twitter debunking all kinds of dodgy tech from Batterizer to Solar Roadways.

[Bruce Abbott]

Actually, less e-junk and wasted resources would be much better for us to survive on the long term. Based on your reasoning we should limit the lifetime of cars to 5 years, instead of using them for 15 to 20 years or even longer.

In Japan they effectively do limit the lifetime of cars to 5 years. Due to that policy I was able to buy an 8 year old imported Nissan Leaf when I never could have afforded a new one. Apart from the battery the car is practically like brand new. In Japan Nissan has a replacement program for old batteries, but I live in new Zealand where the Nissan agents aren't at all interested in doing it (either for imports or cars sold locally through them). They want to me to buy a new Leaf - or better yet some polluting gas car that they can make more money out of servicing - every 5 years or so.

And that's how Japanese car manufacturers can continuously innovate while making lots of money. But they make more money from bigger more expensive cars, so that's what they push (who cares about the environment, eh?). Nissan got their CEO Carlos Ghosn (father of the Nissan Leaf) arrested on trumped up charges of fraud. Seems they didn't like the direction he was leading the company, as they have lots of bloated gas cars they still want to sell.

Ironically, we would actually be better off if most gas cars were taken off the road after 5 years - and replaced with electric cars. But not more gas-guzzling SUVs. This same principle also applies to computers. Modern computers can be made much less power hungry and cheaper than older ones with the same functionality. But bloat prevents that from being realized. Microsoft could easily keep supporting older versions of Windows that are less resource hungry and just as capable - but they don't (unless you are the US military) because there's no money in it.

It's all about the money. You know it, I know it, we all know that money makes the world go around. That's how the system works and anything that threatens it threatens our way of life. Long term? In the long run we are all dead. Who cares about after that? Capitalists don't care at all. And we are all capitalists - we wouldn't be part of the system if we weren't.

[Bruce Abbott]

The same way availability of books free of charge increases the sale of books by the same author, as discovered by Baen Books' Baen Free Library.  It was founded in 1999 by Eric Flint, an author himself, and publisher Jim Baen.

Books, computer games, they're exactly the same  - right? Wrong.

I ran a computer shop from 1991 to 2002. I can assure you that availability of pirated games did nothing to improve sales of the originals. I sold heaps of blank disks though, and the computers to use them on. Still wasn't enough to save Commodore, because software developers were sick to death of piracy. They put demos on magazine cover disks but it didn't help much. Games that took years to develop were cracked in days (sometimes even before release) and distributed around the world via the pirate networks. By the time the latest games got shipped to New Zealand everybody already had a free copy. A few people were willing pay for the originals, either because they wanted the physical stuff that came with it or they were just too honest. The vast majority didn't care. This eventually led to collapse of the Amiga games market.
 

The reason Nintendo try to stop people making emulators is obvious - because they know people will use them to play pirated games.

Yet, there is no actual data backing that "knowing".  In fact, actual experiments and statistics points to the opposite.

So you say. But it's not up to you to decide. If Nintendo don't really 'know', and could actually sell more games by letting people play free copies on their PCs, then it's their choice to not do so. You are not on their board of directors, so you don't get a say. One thing for sure though is that Nintendo is one of the few console game producers still in business, and was last year rated the richest company in Japan. They didn't get there by making stupid decisions.

Except for a few bad apples who try to make a profit off others (by clandestinely using open source in their commercial projects, usually breaking the license; or by making fake cartridges or copies of games and selling them), a typical "pirate" actually spends more money on games than those who do not "pirate" at all.  Companies didn't ditch DRM because they decided to be lenient towards "pirates"; they did so because it hurt their sales.

Yes, DRM hurts sales. But if it wasn't for pirates (which on some platforms is the majority of users if you don't have some DRM) it wouldn't be necessary. Game cartridges are themselves a form of DRM, because they are expensive for the individual to copy and fake cartridges can be impounded. Game console makers got by for years because of this. However today - with modern PCs, emulators, and the net - users don't need to buy any hardware and distribution is essentially free. The only people making money from that are computer hardware vendors, ISPs, and Microsoft.
 

But by all means, do take your personal beliefs stemming from stereotypes and other peoples beliefs as "knowledge" and "facts", and completely ignore what results have been discovered by actual independent research.  No, I will not give you any sources or links...

I don't need links or studies to show me the practical difference between open source and closed source software. Right now I am using a PC running Linux Lite, which is practically the same as Windows but totally free. How many others are doing so? How much are the authors making from it? All Linuxes combined currently have 2% of the desktop market. Windows has 76%, MacOS X has 16%.  Microsoft didn't get to be number 1 by making their software open source.

A bit over two decades ago, I was just like you.  Then, I hired a lawyer to teach me how open source licenses, and copyright licenses in general.  I learned how open source actually works for a company working on ordinary profit-making principles.

Good for you. But don't assume that because it worked for you it must work for everyone. Plenty of software developers have started open source and then realized they needed more control over their IP. Hey, maybe some of them were wrong about that. But you don't get to tell them what's best for their situation. The market will decide. If Nintendo is anything to go by then the market has already decided...
 

[Siwastaja]

So you say. But it's not up to you to decide. If Nintendo don't really 'know', and could actually sell more games by letting people play free copies on their PCs, then it's their choice to not do so.

It is their choice yes - but what they actually own, what they can exactly do about it, and who they can target, is all limited by law.

For example, if your neighbor plays music too loudly for your comfort, you have every legal right to complain to the landlord or maybe even press charges, but you can't kill your neigbor, cut their electricity, or attack the company who manufactured their audio equipment, or the one who installed their TV set.

Similarly, the only thing Nintendo can legally do something about is to attack those who distribute the game cartridge images (rom files) because those are copies of copyrighted software.

Meanwhile, emulators, as long as they come without any games, are just completely legal, like your neighbor's audio equipment, even if it can be used to play illegally obtained content.

Similarly, making gameplay or emulator videos on Youtube is completely legal.

Making fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, on the other hand, is, AFAIK, an actual criminal offense: the "cure" is worse than the disease, especially because it attacks different people than those actually responsible. People downplay the seriousness of this, but it is actually a pretty big deal fundamentally. Our Western societies are built on the idea that independent authorities (police, judges) decide if someone is guilty, and only said authorities can limit our freedom of speech, and even then under very strict rules. Laws like DMCA (and similar laws elsewhere) shifted this responsibility to individual private companies; similar to you actually having the right to kill your neighbor, for a good reason explicitly specified in law (e.g., neighbor attacking you and you acting as self-defence). To compensate for this shift, it was made illegal to misuse this power - obviously. This is equivalent to you killing your neighbor when he actually did not attack you - try and see what happens.

Yet, large companies do fraudulent DMCA actions - criminal offenses - all the freaking time without getting prosecuted and convicted. And even more weirdly, there are people on the internet who try to justify these actions with some mental acrobatics. This just demonstrates how ****ed up society we live in.

[PlainName]

I agree with much of what you said there, but...

Microsoft didn't get to be number 1 by making their software open source.

They didn't get there by selling to the end user, either. I think most sales were actually the Microsoft tax, where they stiffed vendors selling PCs. It's no coincidence that at one time (not sure about now) it was cheaper to buy a new PC with Windows installed than with no OS at all.

I don't think Microsoft is a good example of either route to big money. Word got to be the de facto office suite because world+dog pirated it, but companies who had to actually pay for stuff then bought it because everyone was used to it. Without the pirating Word probably wouldn't have beat the opponents (or if it did, not as fast), but of course a game cartridge isn't going to be an essential business tool.

[Berni]

Yep it is the fact that big companies abuse various methods of silencing people/things, rather just taking them to court for what is actually ilegal by the law. Or in the case of Nintendo actually taking a open source project they tried to squash in the past and using it as the core component of a product that they then sell and turn a profit on. Even Microsoft or Sony don't pull evil stunts like that.

Yes, DRM hurts sales. But if it wasn't for pirates (which on some platforms is the majority of users if you don't have some DRM) it wouldn't be necessary. Game cartridges are themselves a form of DRM, because they are expensive for the individual to copy and fake cartridges can be impounded. Game console makers got by for years because of this. However today - with modern PCs, emulators, and the net - users don't need to buy any hardware and distribution is essentially free. The only people making money from that are computer hardware vendors, ISPs, and Microsoft.

In 2020 the developer CD Project Red released one of the biggest games of the year Cyberpunk 2077 completely DRM free. Yet it was found among the top sellers for the year in multiple platforms. The same developer has released a lot of its games in a similar way in the past 15 years and they are doing well, in fact they are racking in huge profits.

DRM is not a requirement for having good sales. Having a good product that is easily accessible for the right price is what brings huge sales numbers.

Yes piracy is bad! If everyone pirated all software then people who create it would go out of business. But there are reasonable lengths to go to when fighting it. For example with any software that businesses use you can focus on hunting down companies that pirate there software. Those are easy to make them pay up handsomely to avoid going to court over something they will surely loose. They also buy 100s of licenses at a time, not just 1 that a home user would.

[Nominal Animal]

Right now I am using a PC running Linux Lite, which is practically the same as Windows but totally free. How many others are doing so? How much are the authors making from it? All Linuxes combined currently have 2% of the desktop market.

And Linux has 100% of the HPC market, and a major piece of the server market (at least twice the next competitor, which is not Windows).
Majority of Linux kernel and library developers get their salary from companies and organizations in this sector.

You think you know Linux by using one on desktop?  You're only leveraging the zero cost aspect of it, and not the things that make it useful and powerful.  You're not willing to pay –– or even to reciprocate by spending time and effort –– for anything, so you and others like you do not even form a market: you're a black hole.  It is exactly the existence of this 'market segment' why nobody sane using Linux for business purposes cares a whit about Linux Desktop market share.  There just isn't any business worth doing there, and a lot of black hole (gimme! gimme! I'm your user, you owe me!) demanders with zero intent on reciprocality or support.  They're not even potential users, they're a burden.

No wonder you have zero understanding of what I was trying to convey.
(I do admit a large part is my failure to convey things in English in concise, understandable manner: me fail English.)

[madires]

It's all about the money. You know it, I know it, we all know that money makes the world go around. That's how the system works and anything that threatens it threatens our way of life. Long term? In the long run we are all dead. Who cares about after that? Capitalists don't care at all. And we are all capitalists - we wouldn't be part of the system if we weren't.

Actually, it's human greed. Money is just a concept. And the economic system also doesn't matter much. You'll find greedy people in all systems.

[Zoli]

Convenience and competition ALWAYS beats piracy - don't look further then the PC game market.
Attached is a study about piracy(pretty old and lonely, 2015), for some details.