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Corps figured out sustained income was better than marketing and making products. All they had to do was take away every digital product and turn it into a subscription.
Then they'll buy each other up until they are an effective monopoly and raise prices forever.
I don't see a way out of this for products already captured if you need them.
Remember the "Cable Wars" of yore (the 90's)? Guess who's back... back again?
Shady, is that you?
No, the real one is standing up.
Tell some men
Bill Clinton?
[intense saxophone solo]
Samurai jack?
I don’t see a way out
Free software exists. And if you have any power over a non-small organization, it's also something you can help improve to fit your needs.
Problem is, they should realise this only creates a gap for a competitor or even worse (from the companies' perspective) a viable open source project that they'll never be able to compete on price with.
Their solution is to buy them in most cases. It's gets hard to turn down $100M.
Fork that.
If the licence is already open source then they can't do shit. Unfortunately, they have other methods of discouraging programmers from working on the project, but ultimately open source will prevail.
FOSS
for products already captured if you need them.
The point is to make an alternative product no one can own/ruin.
There is no real need to use captured products though, so OP's question is flawed.
Any desire to use said products (or not) needs to weigh the pros and cons of the captured products vs alternatives.
I think we are seeing that gigantic companies made out of other companies don't function well. People move on eventually