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 distri

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.