And yet the Debian package manager has been there, provided free for so long that it was around to watch the dot-com boom and then the bust and then watch the rise of the public cloud afterwards.
Sure you can’t expect things to be available free forever, except many software package repositories have been available, free, forever. We have countless software package managers (apt, brew, pacman), countless language library managers (npm, maven, CPAN) and countless other tools that have had free and relatively unmetered access for literally a generation.
If anything, “Software X will always be a CLI installation away, free, forever” is an old Linux expectation that’s existed for over 30 years and not some “cloud” mentality.
Sure you can’t expect things to be available free forever, except many software package repositories have been available, free, forever. We have countless software package managers (apt, brew, pacman), countless language library managers (npm, maven, CPAN) and countless other tools that have had free and relatively unmetered access for literally a generation.
If anything, “Software X will always be a CLI installation away, free, forever” is an old Linux expectation that’s existed for over 30 years and not some “cloud” mentality.