I could lend out my old computer with old games installed to somebody else to use, right?
What if instead i lend my hard drive, is it still the same thing? Or what if I lend out my remote access screen sharing password to my old PC. Still the same?
Maybe the legal workaround is to game the system here a bit - forget downloading executables which feels a lot like pirating and just lend access to a system that is legally running the original license.
You are correct. Later drives sometimes had a cable select dip switch/pin or different ports on the motherboard.
Naturally
Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.
I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.
And if you work for a company that supports causes you don’t agree with… Move on.