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I ran into a similar situation with a perpetual licence. Tried to reactivate after a couple of years, and was told to upgrade to their new and improved subscrip

by II2II 4y ago

I ran into a similar situation with a perpetual licence. Tried to reactivate after a couple of years, and was told to upgrade to their new and improved subscription plan. I shrugged my shoulders and life went on. The thing is, I have been mostly in the open source world for decades. All their actions did was reaffirm my use of open source and make it even less likely that commercial software vendors will see a dime of my money in the future. It hurts everyone, unfortunately. Alas, it is difficult to figure out which vendors will actually honour their licenses.

scarface74 4y ago
If the maintainers abandon the open source project you are using and no one else is willing to maintain it, are you going to make the changes to make it compatible with newer operating systems and fix security issues? If not, you’re still not much better off by using open source software.
- II2II 4y ago
  Of course you're still better off. If we were talking about software created a quarter century ago, there would not be much of a difference. You had the distribution media. You had a license key. You could continue to use that software with a perpetual license indefinitely. It may mean keeping old hardware around, isolating the software from the network, or dealing with bugs indefinitely, but at least you had that option. (For the most part.) Contrast that to today. Consumers have virtually no control over the software they licensed. In the worse case scenario, the vendor can prevent its use at any time. A more typical situation involves the user losing access sometime after the vendor dropping support (even if it is unintentional, say due to them going out of business). That is far worse than the original scenario, the scenario of dealing with unsupported software, since access is lost altogether. As for having access to the source, it can help in some situations. I have certainly made (very minor) tweaks to programs to get it running. But another scenario would relate to the question, "how important is it to keep the software running?" With open source software, you could hire someone to maintain it if it was important enough. With restrictive licensing, the best case scenario is dealing with extortion. (And yes, I would call it extortion if a company changes the terms of the license to extract revenue.) The worse case scenario is losing access altogether, either due to a product being dropped or a company going under.

by II2II 4y ago

scarface74 4y ago

If the maintainers abandon the open source project you are using and no one else is willing to maintain it, are you going to make the changes to make it compatible with newer operating systems and fix security issues? If not, you’re still not much better off by using open source software.

II2II 4y ago
Of course you're still better off. If we were talking about software created a quarter century ago, there would not be much of a difference. You had the distribution media. You had a license key. You could continue to use that software with a perpetual license indefinitely. It may mean keeping old hardware around, isolating the software from the network, or dealing with bugs indefinitely, but at least you had that option. (For the most part.) Contrast that to today. Consumers have virtually no control over the software they licensed. In the worse case scenario, the vendor can prevent its use at any time. A more typical situation involves the user losing access sometime after the vendor dropping support (even if it is unintentional, say due to them going out of business). That is far worse than the original scenario, the scenario of dealing with unsupported software, since access is lost altogether. As for having access to the source, it can help in some situations. I have certainly made (very minor) tweaks to programs to get it running. But another scenario would relate to the question, "how important is it to keep the software running?" With open source software, you could hire someone to maintain it if it was important enough. With restrictive licensing, the best case scenario is dealing with extortion. (And yes, I would call it extortion if a company changes the terms of the license to extract revenue.) The worse case scenario is losing access altogether, either due to a product being dropped or a company going under.