Those of us who have been around in the software industry for a while usually have some experience of being shafted, or left high and dry, by a particular softw

Those of us who have been around in the software industry for a while usually have some experience of being shafted, or left high and dry, by a particular software product or company. The most pernicious activity that I've seen is the "pay us for this upgrade which you don't really want or need or else we disable your software" business model. It's not explicitly expressed in those terms of course, but that's what it amounts to. Another problem which I've come across is the situation where a software company disappears and there are outstanding bugs which can't be fixed by anyone. Sometimes the ownership rights mean that even ex-developers from a defunct software company can't independently continue to support software which they wrote.