2000snostalgia

tl;dr: don't believe strangers on the internet about digital rights, including me

With that said, you're splitting hairs for no good reason imo. When people talk about having owned software they mean it in the way people talk about owning copies of books or movies or music, which is to say they don't mean "ownership of the software code or the right to do anything you want with it." Basically nobody buys a copy of a book or the like thinking they somehow have the full rights to them nor that they could do with them what they will, outside of maybe sharing them with a friend or selling them when they're done with them.

Really, the law simply hasn't caught up sufficiently with digital media to properly address software ownership in ways that meet the interests of both businesses and civilians. That said, the simple fact that you can sell a used copy of software on physical media is sufficient to indicate that your point is rather weak. The absence of a digital infrastructure to enable a similar sort of secondhand market is more of an indication of the failings of existing legal systems to have kept pace more than anything imo. There really is no good reason that one couldn't exchange or sell used (licenses of) digital goods beyond businesses interested in maintaining control over digital markets, governments failing to check them, and civilians failing to compel their governments to check them.