Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️Someone really needs to develop a lightweight VM container that we can stuff software in. Like, you know how you can buy DOS games on steam, and it just gives you dosbox preconfigured to play the game?
That, but for all software on all OSes
✧✦Catherine✦✧@foone i'm not sure how useful this is outside of software as art
ime the biggest use case for "i want to run ancient software" is when you have ancient hardware, and virtualization famously does not work very well for that
@foone mind you it's still super worth it to preserve art
but it's not useful for _all software_. regretfully.
John "Dobbymoodge" Lamb@whitequark @foone not even subscription-unencumbered video and photo editing software and the like? Being able to pass on a valid *legal* license to someone - or some organization - who needs just the features that were available ca. 2001 and doesn't want some company's spyware injector running in the background might be valuable. Not necessarily for economic reasons, but security and compliance.
@dobbymoodge @foone right, Adobe.
@whitequark @foone You said it, not me 😉
But my point is old software that became useful before it was saddled with intrusive subscription licensing is still useful, and being able to run it legally on modern systems would be great. The scenario that jumped to mind is donating legal licensed software to non-profits or community organizations that may be targeted for audits because of the folks they serve. Adobe tools were the example I picked, but lots of software could be used this way.