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 👍🏻
This is pretty wild to see. Based on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Office
Some people could have purchased this as late as early October 2021.
If companies are going to literally steal things from the user, then why would I buy anything from them in the future?
This is a clear sign to everyone to not buy anything from Microsoft moving forward, because they clearly think they can just take it back at any time.
Yet another reason to stick with LibreOffice and other FOSS open source software.
ATM machine.
Yet another reason to look for alternatives to Libre.
What lawyerspeak TOS bullshit are they going to cite as a way to avoid refunds and lawsuits?
That’s EOL and they won’t do any additional support. Renew certificates is 1 hours of intern effort and 20 bucks, so fuck you.
*effort and cost made up, but l considering they made billions with office, it’s basically equivalent.
god i love when my decisions pan out the way i want them to
LIBREOFFICE is the answer!
I was about to purchase some legitimate licenses for MS products when this was first announced.
saved myself the money and trouble and just pirated it.
mehh I’ve been using Libre office for many years, fuck 'em.
LibreOffice is so good I donate to the community that keeps these projects alive!
Rossman posted a video a while ago about how Microsoft updated their site without noting they updated it to gaslight their customers into thinking it’s always said that.
There’s a reason these companies are trying to kill the archive sites, it lets people call them on their bullshit.
Edit: YouTube source
Somewhat loaded headline
I hate how people getting scammed by near monopolistic monoliths casually being fraudulent in their advertisements is them being “idiots” rather than just victims who haven’t spent their whole life navigating the myriad ways billionaires are researching to more elegantly fuck us. Why consumer protection is supposed to be a thing, why anti-trust is supposed to be a thing, and people are trapped between fascists and a “tactical vote” alternative that has done very little to stop the fascists from casually dismantling these protections.
Good job media for always individualizing the problem and blaming the victims.
It’s an appeal directly to the thriving community of intellectual property pirates here on Lemmy in order to make the post directly to the front page.
Notice that neither of you have refuted the veracity of the headline claim.
It can sometimes be annoying when news communities require posts to use an article’s original headline, but it definitely makes sense at times.
Like this time
You think so? I only see an acurate representation oft reality
Love it.
Idiots?
I’m not one of them, but what makes them idiots? Seems kind of uncalled for.
I think it’s just sarcastic
It just wouldn’t be a lemmy post without a smug sense of superiority.
Seems like you feel superior to them
Agreed. I don’t know if this is the term for it, but I’ve been thinking of all this as “signaling disrespect,” a deliberate attempt to make people think of their peers as lesser, as other.
I feel like either people have been conditioned to do this online all the time for some reason, or maybe there’s some directed attack against civility. I don’t know. But I refuse to let myself be affected by it. I won’t hate people.
I suppose you’re right, in certain communities.
I suppose they call them idiots because they trusted microslop’s “eternal” definition and even paid for it when there are FOSS alternatives?
A: gets scammed by company
B: You’re so stupid, you should have known that company was going to scam you.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me multiple times since the 90s, that’s on me.
/s
Non sarcastic take, only MS is to blame.
As if Microsoft was founded just yesterday and wasn’t scamming everyone at everything for like decades, right?
They don’t have a history of undoing perpetual licenses though. I mean, I know people who still use a licensed copy of office 2000
Now they have. The point is, if you trust that company for whatever reason, it’s your problem. What makes you believe they’re to be trusted? That they changed? There’s nothing that indicates that, yet people keep not just using their
unprofessionalincompetent code glued stack, they pay money for it.Oftentimes it’s not a choice. Microsoft office is a de facto standard in many professional contexts.
I personally avoid using Microsoft products whenever I can but that doesn’t mean everybody has that luxury.And I cannot blame anyone buying a perpetual licence when the alternative is a subscription.
I’m not defending this action from Microsoft, but for most people, they buy a Microsoft product and then happily use it for years, none the wiser to any of Microsoft’s other nonsense happening in the background.
Coming from a background where software is usually pirated and not paid for (which I don’t support now), it’s a special kind of weird to pay for that shite. I mean, who could have guessed? Me personally, I have no empathy for those. Go buy the next license from Microsoft, I guess. Till they screw you again.
If you pay for something, pay for quality. I understand people who buy Apple stuff, it’s not even overpriced when you consider all the factors. Windows people are fooling themselves, and it’s really fun to watch. ‘Idiots’ is the right word in my book. So I vibe with the title, it’s more correct than the Verge’s one.
‘Douchebag’ is the right word in my book.
North American English, innit?
And those customers shouldn’t have been dressed like that!
Not saying that I agree with the title, just explaining what I think was the reason.
Although one could say that trusting microslop to keep their word after what we’ve seen them do in the last years is… foolish to say the least.
They probably still came out ahead with 7 years of use without paying subscriptions to Microsoft.
Still not what they paid for though. 😐
I’m not one of them, but what makes them idiots? Seems kind of uncalled for.
It’s obviously a play on the common phrase that the honest guy ends up being the idiot. Not because the honest guy is stupid but because the honesty ends up backfiring. It’s used all the time in video game DRM contexts.
It was obviously not obvious to me, but okay. I’ll take your word for it. 🙃
Anyone who pays to install software from a spyware company is incredibly naive to say the least
Must be like the vast majority of everyone alive that uses some kind of tech these days, then. 🤷♂️ I just felt like the title is over the top a little bit. If it had been in a comment it would’ve made me react less for some reason. 😄
I get it. You’re absolutely right it doesn’t make them idiots. Even I’m being hyperbolic to an extent. The real issue is much bigger and doesn’t stop at Microsoft. I get why people feel so powerless and end up going along with the status quo. Really, the fact that we’ve allowed it is more of a reflection on our collective Idiocracy.
It’s only morning here but I feel like this comment is the best interaction online I’m gonna have today.
Great response. And not because you agree with me but because it was even way more insightful than what I said.
Have a good one, friend. 🫶
Not sure why they’re idiots, trying to go the non-sub option is smart, doesn’t vote for subs. Microsoft is the asshole here.
Not sure why OP is sitting here tanking these hits, but I don’t think OP meant to call people who bought perpetual licenses to Office idiots. I think they’re saying that Microsoft thinks they’re idiots. Still, OP should have clarified that or at least answered at least one person who asked.
Because it’s a repost.
If you go to the original, OP actually has the top comment explaining exactly that: “idiots” refers to MS treating their customers as such, not a judgement by OP.
I’m not sure I’m cool with calling people ‘idiots’ in this scenario. We don’t blame the victims of con men when they’re stolen from, and this is the same thing, just on a bigger scale.
That said, here is the obligatory linking to LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/
It’s free and a better choice.
And for anyone who says in excel I can create a spreadsheet sheet that does this amazing company defining process, I’ll counter that with you can make a calculator in Minecraft. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
We need to quit focusing on stuff like this. If somebody calls you a fucking idiot so fucking what?
And we do blame the victims constantly. The people that blame the victims do nothing but fucking win.
And some of us ARE idiots, no need to throw us under the bus, it’s still wrong to take advantage of stupid people
i read it as sarcasm, i would write it like that, especially if i was one of them
I read it as someone kinda being a dick, but it’s the Internet. Meaning isn’t always well-conveyed electronically. That’s why we have the sarcasm tag.
Had you gone as far as the article you would have seen the disclaimer that makes it clear it’s sarcasm.
I did.
The title of the article is ‘Microsoft is disabling Office 2019 for Mac next month’, which makes it pretty clear that the editorializing of the title here on Lemmy was intended to be a bit dickish, at least to me.
If I am wrong, cool, but it’s not because I didn’t look at the article.
They mean that when it was originally posted on the db0 Lemmy piracy community, there was a disclaimer to say it was sarcasm
Well, maybe they should have clicked through to the article.
/s
Disabled or pirated are not the only options:
Since the OP specifies Mac users, as a Mac user, I find iWork perfectly serviceable. I think it’s a bit controversial with its “Ribbon” on the right rather than the top, though it kind of makes sense. I don’t love iWork (Writer, Numbers, and Keynote), but they are good and they come with Macs (or at the very least are free in the App Store).
I have tried LibreOffice recently, and I didn’t care for it. But I am glad that such a robust free office suite is available on Windows. I believe some Linux distros ship with it, too. If I didn’t have iWork, I’d probably just use LibreOffice. It’s not terrible, I just have a better choice.
a robust free office suite
The few times I tried using LibreOffice, it’s anything but robust. Very bad UX, and even worse, it frequently crashes and fails to recover, resulting in data loss. And I’ve only been using Linux for more than 10 years now.
The Apple office apps are still free, but they do have an add-on subscription too now.
Yes… I was able to disable the subscription-oriented tools from Numbers (Excel) but not Pages (Word). Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. They’re marked so you can just not click on them, but there’s a way to hide them. I did it on one, I can probably do it on the others.
They’re completely free with a subscription for GenAI stuff that wasn’t there before. They didn’t take anything away from the free product.
It’s been quite a while since I used iWork, but iWork is different than office. In some ways it’s a better product - the layout and formatting in Pages is worlds ahead of Word. It’s not a clone of the Office suite, which works to its advantage.
Is iWork compatible with Office files though? That’s going to be the sticking point for people who had been using it and lost access…
As far as I can tell, yes — and so is LibreOffice, since people are talking about that one, too. And I suspect they both have the same limitation — encrypted Office files. So yes, I can read .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files. I can’t read Publisher (.pubx) files, but neither can Mac Office users — Microsoft never released Publisher for Mac. I can then write them to the iWork formats. I can also take an iWork document and export to Office. I suspect Office can import iWork files. Office interoperability is mostly a solved problem, though I think there are a few outlier cases.
Yes, it opens the files and can work with them. However to save them back to the original filetype, you need to export
^ This. Easy to get, easy to install, works like a charm and the license is “perpetual” you won’t need bother with it ever again.
The last Mac I put this on was determined not to let me change doc files to open with it no matter what I did. It would change it for individual files only, but not the file type. Maybe because it was m1 or something.
I’d argue trying to avoid yet another subscription by paying upfront was an honest and good faith strategy. The problem was assuming Microsoft also acts in good faith, and wouldn’t just take the money and run like they have just 7 years in.
Honestly for things like this, I would struggle to be convinced that these folks aren’t entirely within their right to take back what they already bought in good faith by pirating it.
After all, perpetual means you bought a license to use that program for life, regardless of whether Microsoft wants to uphold that or not.
Not surprised in the least. It’s all about maintaining incoming cash flow.
They cancelled my Win11 (from purchased Win10 eligible upgrade) key earlier this year when I replaced a failed motherboard.
Happy to be free of their ecosystem. Should have jumped free long ago.
Welcome to the other side. Breathe the free air again
Thanks! Still having some problems with sound popping, but had that under Windows. >.<
Which distro? I had a similar issue
Mint. I’ve gotten the popping/crackling to a minimum, but it’s still happening occasionally. (Oddly it happens most often with games that have sound disabled both by OS and via in game)
It was annoying enough I saved it, I highly recommend starting some sort of docs setup so future you can remember how you fixed things. This fixed it for me, granted I was on pop but both Ubuntu based so same layers underneath.
Audio Crackling
You can fix this by increasing the minimum audio buffer size, which, in turn, will increase the overall audio latency.
It’s not good for real-time professional audio recording, but it won’t hurt the general gaming and multimedia experience unless you use a very high value to the point it leads to a noticeable desync with video. Test with a greater minimum quantum
This takes effect immediately, but it won’t persist across reboots.
This worked for me
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 2048Increasing the minimum quantum permanently
The default is 1024.
cat << EOF > ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/fix-crackle.conf context.properties = { default.clock.min-quantum = 2048 } EOF systemctl --user restart pipewire wireplumberYou can revert this by just deleting the file. Alternative method
This will improve the handling of low-latency audio at the expense of overall higher CPU usage and with that, power usage.
sudo kernelstub -a threadirqs reboot
So far, so good. Thanks much for this!
Of course, welcome to the Linux community!
If people are buying such software on their own dime, they’re getting played. Happens once, OK you didn’t know it was a con job. Happens twice, you’re a fool…
But if it’s on your company’s dime, meh, not your problem.
Absolutely fair points but I think it should be illegal to sell a “perpetual” license - perpetual means everlasting - and then it turns out to not be perpetual
They should be forced to honor the perpetual contracts
perpetually in this insatnce means, for as long as they say
Yeah, I’d say they’d be looking at a class action suit if it weren’t for the fact that it’s just so easy to apply a pirate crack.
