When you buy a book, you own a book.

I have been a professional software developer for over thirty years. In that time I have watched the industry curdle into "Software as a Service" - pay every month, forever, to own nothing. Stop paying and everything you built your day around simply vanishes. Worse still, books, movies, music, everything we used to own we're now being told is only being loaned to us at full price. It is predatory, and frankly it is evil.

And it is not just software. Amazon has the audacity to tell people that the movies they bought and the books they paid for were never really theirs - that a purchase can be revoked, edited, or quietly deleted from their library at their whim. You did not buy it. You rented it. In 2009, they removed purchased copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" from everyone's Kindle without permission, then promised they would never do that again. And yet, today, are actively in the process of fighting to be able to legally use the word "buy" when they secretly mean "license".

Then, as if this weren't bad enough already, they also add spyware to all applications now. Every item you buy, every video you watch, every item you browse, every link you click, they're spying, packaging, and reselling your data. You, yourself, have become their product without your permission. And recently? Microsoft has even created a system that takes a screenshot of your screen every second. If you believe for a second they won't soon be sending the summaries of everything you've ever done on your home computer screen back to their servers, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Even PLEX has jumped on board witht he predation. You now can't even watch your own local movies while on vacation without a subscription.

So I started writing my own software, for my own home, free from the idea that I "will own nothing and be happy".

This will only get worse if we let it.

So I have decided that PeculiarHabit is where I will package that software into applications anyone can install, and release the code and the installers as I finish them. I will make them simple windows services. Self-installing with a simple interface.

You will not see this site or these tools advertised. I don't have the money for that, so spread it by word of mouth. If enough people simply stop renting and start owning, the market that rewards these practices dries up. Legally, and permanently.