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Once upon a time
Once upon a time... isn't that how all good stories went? Anyway, once upon a time software was purchased. You handed over pieces of paper with the Queen's face on one side, and in return got a tangible thing. A little lump of something solid with a bunch of metal legs on each side like a digital millipede. Or a cassette tape that featured neither Queen nor Madonna, but rather a screeching not unlike an early Mariah Carey. Later on this became floppy discs, originally large and properly floppy like the name suggested, and then smaller and harder. In time this gave way to shiny plastic discs of various types. In all cases, the software was yours.
Not "yours" yours, the right to use it was licenced to you so you had some restrictions such as not making copies, not giving it to friends, and sometimes weird things like "single user" (makes sense, the means you) and "single processor" (dumb).
Sometimes these rights were backed up by arcane sorts of copy protection from peculiar disc formats to bashing hardware to an actual physical dongle that plugged in somewhere. But, alas, most of these copy protection schemes were extremely fragile (for example, the change from RISC OS 2 to RISC OS 3 broke quite a few of them, as did moving from the old 1772 floppy chip to the newer SuperIO combi chip - to give just two examples), and often not that difficult to work around if one knew a little bit of assembler.
At any rate, the software was yours to install and use.
Somehow we seem to have sleptwalked (somehow "sleepwalked" just doesn't feel right as only half of it is in the past tense) into a situation where we have "Software as a Service" (SaaS), which is a fancy way of saying "it's a subscription".
On the face of it, this seems like a pretty good idea. Once upon a time, PhotoShop was pretty pricey, so paying a smaller monthly amount can bring some decent software your way. But, now, it's pricey and it's recurring. The current price in France is €39,31/month (if paying monthly) or €314,35/year (if paying yearly). The monthly subscription works out notably more expensive at €471,72/year. By contrast, a one-off purchase of PhotoShop CS6 is given as being €250 in 2017, but another source gave it as $699 in US$ so probably "about €500" is a more realistic figure. If you're starting out or have a low budget then maybe forty a month sounds good, but the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of subscription models is going to mount up rapidly. Five years of monthlies, you're looking at something in the ballpark of two and a half thousand, assuming the price stays the same.
But, alas, with a lot of this "service" software, they use their own file formats and in some cases may even try to claim rights over work created using the software (though in many cases this is contrary to copyright law which generally protects original work created by individuals). What this means is that you may well be tied to continuing to use the software in order to access your information, data, and creations.
In other words, the subscription model is not only trying to bleed you dry, it is also holding your data ransom to persuade you to continue paying.
This situation is further exacerbated by the fact that so many companies have bought into the Microsoft world, which means they'll throw proprietary files around without a second thought. A while back an employer sent me an XLS file. I replied that I don't run Windows so don't have the software necessary to deal with XLS files, please could they use a standard open file format?
The HR lady gave me a printout. It was... a list of things. I forget what for, but somebody had made a list in a spreadsheet. A list that could have so very easily been thrown together in Notepad and saved as a regular text file.
Obviously, some companies may be more accommodating than others here, but the general sentiment will be that you're somehow in the wrong as "everybody can deal with Excel files". Or Word, or PhotoShop, or whatever. This attitude, coupled with the tendency of software companies to make arbitrary small changes to file formats in order to keep open source solutions playing catch-up helps to promote the supposed superiority of commercial rented software, and thus give the psychological impetus to push people to cough up the coins.
I would love to say "well, the solution is to use open source", but unfortunately as good as Linux is (and personally I think it beats Windows), there is a ridiculous amount of unnecessary hassle:
- there is a lot of infighting (just mention systemd or Wayland)
- there is a lot of politics (Gnome, Wayland, Xfce, etc)
- there are a lot of forum posts that are badly out of date (like anything that mentions Linux Mint and PulseAudio - which may or may not include Ubuntu and/or Debian depending on where and when the audio subsystem was changed).
- there are a lot of bugs - I was surprised at how buggy Audacity was, I'm sure I used it a long time ago on Windows and it just did it's thing.
- ...related to the above, probably half the reason mainstream distributions are holding back on switching to Wayland is how much stuff breaks.
And, of course, the big issue of there being dozens of distributions from dozens of distributors leading to a huge number of options and choices. You know how I picked my Linux? I'd noticed people on TheRegister saying good things about the Mint releases, and I liked the name Cinnamon. Kind of arbitrary. I'm happy with it (sound quirks aside), but was there a version more suitable for me? I don't know. Short of buying a disposable PC and installing several dozen to see, I probably won't ever know.
At any rate, this is a challenge for a nerd to take on. An ordinary office drone? Nope. They'll hope that the IT department can sort out all the issues and HR can arrange training if it's too alien.
Or to circle back to the Photoshop example, compare it with Gimp. I have no doubt that Gimp is powerful but in a way it suffers from being overly complex, and the itty-bitty fonts and icons to try to fit so much on-screen at once don't help.
On my old XP box I used a freebie called PhotoImpact5 which was sort of Photoshop Lite. It was powerful enough to be useful, but simple enough that you didn't need training and several O'Reilly books to guide you through it... Gimp, on the other hand... okay, maybe it's me but I just find it obscure and a bit of a pain in the arse to use. But I use it because there doesn't appear to be anything simpler without being literally aimed at children (or just basic photo tweaking which I can do on my phone).
Couple this with how a lot of software is written (as a hobby or passion project), it lacks a certain level of seriousness that companies expect.
I'll give an example. The place I worked slowly transitioned over to Linux. Everything was installed, set up, it was all running. Some of the staff adapted to OpenOffice or whatever it was they were using at the time, others needed training because it wasn't identical to Microsoft Office, so they got lost.
Things seemed to be going well - except for one notable problem. The stock control system. It kept losing things. In between the factory floor and head office, data was just going missing to the point where the poor stock girls had to do weekly inventory and anything checked out would need to be done on the computer and on paper, and the computer tally checked daily. Why? Well, we had ISO accreditation, which means full traceability from supplier to product. Stuff vanishing is, actually kind of a big deal.
After a lot of diagnostics by the IT guys, it was determined to be a bug in the software they were using. They contacted the author. I'm not privy to the exact response, but one of the IT guys told me it was basically "you have the source code, you fix it".
They worked over the following weekend to scrub every trace of Linux from the company, reinstalled Windows, and then looked for a stock control system. They found one, but it had some pretty fundamental issues. So the company that made the stock control software sent their guys around to observe what we were doing and how, and the software was modified accordingly. I am sure this exercise cost a fair bit, but that's the thing - companies expect critical stuff to work and will generally throw money at the problem until it does. The idea of "fix it yourself" may make sense to a hobbyist or somebody who's deep into the open source ethos, but from the perspective of a company it's the utter height of unprofessionalism. Granted, the programmer may not have wanted to be a company slave paid to make something work, which they are totally entitled to, but whatever, too much of that sort of attitude keeps the pro stuff on Windows. Windows also offers something Linux doesn't, and that's regularity. Windows is like the McDonald's of operating systems. Deeply unimpressive to the point of boring, but Windows on one PC will largely look and act like Windows on another.
Linux, on the other hand, has like a hundred distributions and nearly as many window managers (or compositors) in numerous graphical environments, and then there's that one guy that boots to console and writes TeX in EMACS and will get homicidal if you so much as mention the existence of pointy-clicky rubbish.
The behaviour of the current United States Administration has brought into focus Europe's reliance on foreign tech solutions, so things may start to change (at speeds measured in galactic timeframes because it's the EU we're talking about...) but for now the solution is to bend over and open your wallet, turn it upside down, and shake it. And don't ever think about cancelling because buried in the terms is the fact that you can only cancel on the night of the full moon closest to your yearly renewal date by calling a number that is never answered...and your inability to say "stop" to anybody is taken as tacit approval for another year.
Starting the day right
For the first day of my holiday, what could be better than starting with croissants straight out of the oven and tea in an actual teapot?
 Tea and croissants? How franglais!
Well, truth be told this happened at around half past noon. I got up at six to feed Anna and the ground was crunchy and it was half a degree. The forecast said "four". So I threw a Tetley into my mug, then went back to bed alternating between scrolling random websites and staring at the wall. Honestly, the wall was more interesting.
Then, by noon, it was 14°C and lots of sunshine. So I put the washing outside and the croissants in the oven. They're from Picard, so they are premade, one just heats them up. The odd thing is that they have an odd aftertaste. They aren't proper croissants made with croissant dough, it's more like that semi-fluffy-flaky stuff that is supplied with make-your-own-pizza kits cut into triangles, rolled up, and then frozen. So it doesn't really match an actual croissant from a bakery in anything more than the shape, but as something hot and fluffy to have with tea, it would suffice.
Plus I could pig out and have four plus a scone. Try doing that at a bakery and seeing how much change is left out of €10, these days.
Woe is bramble
Now, it wouldn't be a Rick holiday in reasonable weather without some mention of wrecking brambles. So here's a before:
 The "Before" photo.
And here's the after:
 The "After" photo.
Since I didn't really have any plan other than "EXTERMINATE!", it wasn't a good angle. So here's a different angle that looks much more impressive.
 A better photo.
It is nineteen paces long, and about three deep. So if we rough-assume that a pace is a metre, then it's 19×3 or 54 square metres.
I'm well aware that my neighbour could do this in about fifteen seconds, but I possess neither tractor nor flail, nor the ability to use either.
Plus there's something oddly satisfying about fighting back against nature whilst listening to music by groups with names like "Dragonland", "Ruins of Elysium", "Signum Regis", and "Battle Beast".
The only sad part to this is that, looking back at my photos, it looks remarkably like what I did at almost the same day in 2024. I think, back then, the brambles were a lot further into the grass, and I've pushed back the same area (roughly) a bit more.
Unlike around the walnut, where the point was to clear around the walnut, I have not gone to the stream/boundary nor do I plan to. I like having a shield of brambles. It keeps larger wildlife, including humans, out and provides a small degree of privacy. I'm not so keen on the gaping hole around the walnut, it would be far too easy for hunters to jump the stream and use my land as a shortcut and while I don't have any particular issue with hunters that are going after the boars, not every hunter around here is, and there's a reason Anna doesn't get to roam freely. Maybe I'm being a bit paranoid, but given that our first cat (Couzou, back around 2003ish?) had his brains blown out by a hunter, I'm not willing to take risks. Unfortunately in the countryside, far too many people think of cats as vermin that are only useful because they hunt other vermin. The idea of a "pet" is an alien concept. A neighbour, a kindly old woman, showed us her rabbits once. Mom was "oh, what do you call them?" thinking that maybe they had names or something. The woman, failing to understand the point of the question, simply shrugged and said "dinner".
So as much as I would like to offer Anna the level of freedom that a cat would appreciate, her time out is fairly controlled this time of year. I'll be a little looser once mid-April rolls around, that's when the official hunting season ends, but I'm aware that a neighbour the other way is an avid hunter with an "if it moves, shoot it" policy. If you recall that video I made at the end of last year where it sounded like a guerrilla invasion? That was just him and his mates, probably shooting at crows or wabbits. And since hunting can be done on your own land whenever you like (and he does)... That being said, I'm sure if Anna could understand, she would accept trading some freedom for not being dead.
Anyway, when she's out she has exactly two behaviours. She will race around chasing anything that exists, and a good few things that don't, and then she'll take herself back home to sleep it off. Rinse and repeat. I've actually watched her on the camera. Mew! Mew! Mew! Me-oh sod this I'm going back to bed. A cat after my own heart, really.
Almost Sakura!
The cherry blossom comes in four passes. The first is that odd cherry out back. That flowered massively on the 2nd of March. The flowers on that have been and gone. Here's a photo of how it looked.
 Boom! Flowers!
Next, as part of the normal sequence of cherry blossom, come the wild "bird" cherries. They flowered some time between this morning and noon.
 The cherry by the stream.
 The blossom on the cherry by the stream.
Next to flower, likely in a few days, is the semi-wild cherry out front.
And lastly, but magnificently if it's anything like last year, the proper "Sakura" pink Japanese flowering cherry, which is often around the second week of April.
And finally...
Now, I had planned to make myself some linguine this evening. But in the course of writing the end part, I had a four-part KitKat and a Marathon (I refuse to call it by the idiotic name of Snickers), so... I dunno, I might just grab a tub of Pringles and that Doritos chilli cheese dip and settle back with an episode or two of One Piece.
But what I shall end with, to circle around to the top of today's blathering, is to say why I find "single processor" licence restrictions to be dumb.
Such a thing wouldn't work at all these days, because how do you define a "processor"? Most modern systems, even ARM boards like the RaspberryPi have multiple cores (which are individual concurrent processing units), as well as a GPU for the graphics, some form of FPU for doing complicated maths at a reasonable speed, maybe about form of FPU for doing simple maths in parallel at high speed (compare in ARM terms VFP versus NEON), plus other co-processor units that may or may not be present depending on the device such as realtime picture resizing, Huffman encoding (for speeding up actions specific to JPEG/MPEG), and so on.
Back in the day, however, things ought to have been simpler. Here's your computer. It has a 6502 or a Z80 and that's how it works.
Except the BBC Micro was never about doing things the easy way. Here is your computer, it has a 6502 and a 65C02. Or maybe a 65C102 and a Z80. Or...
Fast forward to the Archimedes era and, well, okay there's an ARM in there, and there's an 80386 on a podule, and there's an 8051 clone that makes the IDE harddisc work, and there's probably another 8051 clone that's looking after the keyboard.
Even back in the days of the IBM XT, there were technically multiple processors. The 8086 (or was it 8088?) inside. The 8051 that did the keyboard, and once you moved beyond the ST506 style harddiscs, there would have been some sort of processor in there too. After all, if the computer sends a command to a unit (back then SCSI or the earlier SASI would have been more common than IDE) to "read this sector from this address", something had to interpret the command, actually make it happen, and then hand back the requested data.
So, putting "single processor" restrictions in a licence is dumb, especially when "processor" is not defined. Or, in any case, doesn't really have relevance (as in the case of the Archie or RiscPC with an x86 inside). Typically this restriction was added because if you had a machine with multiple CPUs then, well, you can pay a licence for each of them. I think it's fair to say that I paid no attention whatsoever to this sort of gibberish. It doesn't matter if my computer is the creation of Doctor Frankenstein and has fifty processors in it (clearly only running RISC OS on one of them! 😉), there's only one of me. Likewise I have tended to install software on multiple machines at the same time (if I couldn't just load it across a network share). Same reason, there's only one of me. How my digital life is arranged (or as mom would have said "why the hell do you need so many computers?") is nobody's concern except mine. And, well, I need so many computers because.........
......I'll get back to you when I have a convincing excuse.
Thinking about it, chips and Netflix might end up with crumbs in bed. That would be unacceptable. I'm in danger of opening a freezer full of like a hundred or so's worth of food, deciding there's nothing to eat, and going to bed hungry. One of the joys of ADHD - faced with too many choices I just don't. I'm like that with Netflix too, which is why I have bookmarked unogs.com, as a list of things that are about to expire out of Netflix helps to focus my concentration - watch it or lose it. If only dinner was that simple.
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| David Pilling, 22nd March 2026, 01:26 |
As a software vendor, I would have loved software as a subscription. Who says things don't get better.
As a software user, I see obvious problems with it - get all my stuff in your proprietary file format and then make me pay to use it - practically kidnapping data.
I imagine this is an age thing, maybe if you're young you trust saas. Gnarly old guys have free command line tools...
Never heard of single processor licences - some software runs faster if multiple processors are available.
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Last read at 01:59 on 2026/04/11.
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