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> Consumers aren't there as a substitute welfare state to provide eternal employment for hungry programmers. The flip side to this argument is that programmers
by Analemma_ 9y ago
> Consumers aren't there as a substitute welfare state to provide eternal employment for hungry programmers.
The flip side to this argument is that programmers aren't obligated to continue fixing bugs and adding features to software forever if they aren't being paid. Software subscriptions are the only way I know of to align the incentives properly so that programmers will actually fix things instead of moving on to an entirely new piece of software that they can sell anew and leave the old one to rot, which is a real problem that has plagued small dev shops forever.
- ghaff 9y agoYes. Historically, it was very common for the stock response for bugs to be "It's fixed in the next version." There was a very strong incentive for companies to force buyers (especially those who weren't on maintenance contracts) to upgrade as frequently as possible. In part for supportability reasons, vendors still cut off support for old versions at some point, but from a revenue perspective, subscriptions get rid of much of the reason to force upgrades.
- pjmlp 9y agoBack in the day fixing bugs meant buying the next version, with a possible discount for being an existing customer.