Also, you should note that only the Wii U and 3DS eShop is being discontinued. The Switch is still supported, and Nintendo claims that downloads for previous generation systems will continue to work. Just saying, you're leaving out some nuance with that line.
All I'm hearing is that Stallman was right: if the users don't control the software, the software controls the users. Free (as in freedom) software doesn't suffer from any of these problems.
This isn't completely true. A lot of free software dries up and disappears overtime if it is not properly archived and saved. I'll give you a couple of examples:
I used to like an online writing program called Paperwork. It was mainly distributed as a Docker containers but the full source code was on Github. The author, sometime in the last couple of years, deleted the Github repo and the Docker container. I haven't been able to find it since. Why did the author(s) do this instead of just dumping the code to archive.org or giving it to the FSF? I don't know, but if no one finds it, it'll be lost forever.
A second example, one of my side projects is doing Usenet archaeology. I recently came across a bunch of open source Usenet newsgroup clients and luckily the source code for some of them was still available on the wayback machine and I uploaded it to Github so people can find it. A lot of stuff, even free software, is lost because nobody wants to maintain it anymore.
Also, you should note that only the Wii U and 3DS eShop is being discontinued. The Switch is still supported, and Nintendo claims that downloads for previous generation systems will continue to work. Just saying, you're leaving out some nuance with that line.
All I'm hearing is that Stallman was right: if the users don't control the software, the software controls the users. Free (as in freedom) software doesn't suffer from any of these problems.
This isn't completely true. A lot of free software dries up and disappears overtime if it is not properly archived and saved. I'll give you a couple of examples:
I used to like an online writing program called Paperwork. It was mainly distributed as a Docker containers but the full source code was on Github. The author, sometime in the last couple of years, deleted the Github repo and the Docker container. I haven't been able to find it since. Why did the author(s) do this instead of just dumping the code to archive.org or giving it to the FSF? I don't know, but if no one finds it, it'll be lost forever.
A second example, one of my side projects is doing Usenet archaeology. I recently came across a bunch of open source Usenet newsgroup clients and luckily the source code for some of them was still available on the wayback machine and I uploaded it to Github so people can find it. A lot of stuff, even free software, is lost because nobody wants to maintain it anymore.