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> lifetime licenses are dishonest (e.g. company cannot work for free, so their funded is based on unlimited growth, which isn't realistic for most). I don’t re

by dahart 4y ago

> lifetime licenses are dishonest (e.g. company cannot work for free, so their funded is based on unlimited growth, which isn't realistic for most). I don’t really know what you mean by “dishonest”, that seems like a slightly hyperbolic word here. If someone pays for a lifetime license the company isn’t working for free nor necessarily assuming unlimited growth, they just have to understand and correctly price the average value of their contract, and there are many established successful businesses doing exactly already. And it’s common to price the lifetime license below the predicted average total costs, because money in the bank today is more valuable than later (it’s an investment, and the money can be used as such.) If there’s something I really know I’m going to use for years, and I can get a discount by paying up front, I’m totally in favor of doing so when it’ll cost me less and support the company as well.

crazygringo 4y ago
I'd say it's dishonest in the sense that a company knows the probabilities are such that they can't actually ever truly support a lifetime license, so it's a lie from the start. At the end of the day, companies usually go out of business or else sell themselves to another company within a certain number of years. And a new company (like in this case) may change their mind about lifetime licenses, because it's a totally different set of owners with different priorities. "Everybody" knows this, but company management knows it even more than consumers, hence the dishonesty. As a rule of thumb for consumers, anything supposedly perpeutal or "lifetime" for consumers in the business world is probably not even going to last 10 years. It's effectively always a lie.
- dahart 4y ago
  Ugh, please don’t make it worse and escalate to “lie”. You’re blaming the wrong source, and have it backwards IMO. The previous owners weren’t lying, the new owners are the ones to blame for breaking a pre-existing contract with the company. Breaking this contract might not be legal, and in that sense they may be only the ones lying.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    If the previous owners were truly committed to upholding the lifetime license, they would have never sold the company without an ironclad legally enforceable guarantee the new owners would uphold the lifetime license as well. They clearly didn't. They either didn't care, or it would have decreased the sale price of the company (or the ability to sell it at all) and they preferred the money. So I absolutely hold the original owners equally responsible. They made the promise and they created the conditions for it to be broken. Which was an entirely predictable outcome, which is why calling it a "lie" doesn't seem inappropriate.
    - dahart 4y ago
      Why do you believe the contract with the customer isn’t legally enforceable? The new owners may just be choosing to break the law because they believe nobody will attempt to sue them over fifty bucks or whatever. I guess you can decide to blame whoever you want, but the legal responsibility for upholding a contract lies with the company, and a change of ownership doesn’t change that from a legal perspective. It also doesn’t change or help anything to make wild assumptions about what the previous owners cared about. You simply cannot control what a new owner does with your company once you sell it, that’s what selling it means. Using words like “lying” when people may have had every intention to meet the contract is just an exaggeratory drain on having reasonable conversation.
      - Veserv 4y ago
        It is absolutely lying. The original owners could have put in a voluntary, irrevocable, liquidated damages clause that is sufficiently punitive that no subsequent owner of the company would think to violate it. As they intend to honor the “lifetime license” for a lifetime and totally do not intend to renege for that duration there is no harm in enforcing that clause with force of law.
        dahart 4y ago
        You didn’t even consider the question I asked. Why are you making the assumption that sale of a lifetime license isn’t currently enforceable by law? The article only complained and didn’t attempt to challenge their license. Your idea only works if someone is willing to challenge the company. If the new owners of a company are choosing to break the contracts or the law, why would you expect another contract to help? There are a million and one promises companies have made to customers and other companies by the time they are acquired. Installing clauses like you suggest for all of them is wildly unrealistic, would be very expensive in billable lawyer hours, may delay or subvert the sale, and above all may be unnecessary/unhelpful/confusing if the existing customer contract is already legally binding.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  I agree. The only time a lifetime license will actually be honored as such is of the company’s product fails and it’s no longer around as a company, so it allows you to continue using the current version as is. When companies that have offered lifetime licenses don’t fail, they inevitably kill the lifetime part of the license by pulling different tricks like, creating a cloud version which now becomes their future version, while the desktop version is no longer maintained, or rebranding the same app as a new app where actual development continues while the old app gets minimal updates at most, or not updating the app with the lifetime license so it works on modern OSes and platforms. If you’re lucky, you may have snagged a lifetime license the company offered early in its life, which it then stopped offering once it started getting successful, so it continues letting you use the lifetime license because the owners of such licenses are few enough that any marginal revenue they may earn by pulling the above tricks is not worth the reputational damage.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    > The only time a lifetime license will actually be honored as such is of the company’s product fails and it’s no longer around as a company, so it allows you to continue using the current version as is. You could also sell mission-critical software with a lifetime license. It just has to be bad enough that it can outlive the user.
- m-p-3 4y ago
  I'm of the advice that lifetime licenses are only sustainable if they're sold as a way to attract early users, as a way to reward their faith into a product that had chances to fail and see their money gone forever. It shouldn't be a type of license that keeps getting sold once the product has matured and has some brand recognition in order to make it sustainable. If the product can run standalone on the client's computer, make it a license for that specific major version, and sell the upgrade to the next major versions for a fraction of the price. Those who wants the latest features can buy the upgrade and sustain the business, and those who are happy with the current version can keep using their version without feeling wronged.
- chung8123 4y ago
  You definitely could support a lifetime license if some of the money is invested and used to pay for the upkeep of each license. It is about pricing the model correctly.
JohnFen 4y ago
I don't think I agree with the "dishonest" label, but lifetime licenses are a bit scammy even when they're offered earnestly.
- MrOwnPut 4y ago
  Could you elaborate? My Plex lifetime license has been very valuable to me and has already saved me money.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Because it's not clear what "lifetime" means. In practice what it means is "until the company is sold" or restructured or whatever. But the implication is that it's for your lifetime. How does your lifetime license save you money over just engaging in a straight-up purchase?
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      It's very clear what it means, it means the lifetime of how long you think this product is going to last. It's a decision as a consumer you make. When I purchased the Plex lifetime license 6 years ago, I asked myself how many years to break even vs if I purchased yearly. The answer was 2.5 years. I also asked myself if Plex was going to last at least that long, and I thought they were, and they did, and I wanted to support them.
  - yebyen 4y ago
    FWIW, I regret not buying a lifetime Plex license. I am still paying every year.

by dahart 4y ago

crazygringo 4y ago

I'd say it's dishonest in the sense that a company knows the probabilities are such that they can't actually ever truly support a lifetime license, so it's a lie from the start. At the end of the day, companies usually go out of business or else sell themselves to another company within a certain number of years. And a new company (like in this case) may change their mind about lifetime licenses, because it's a totally different set of owners with different priorities. "Everybody" knows this, but company management knows it even more than consumers, hence the dishonesty. As a rule of thumb for consumers, anything supposedly perpeutal or "lifetime" for consumers in the business world is probably not even going to last 10 years. It's effectively always a lie.

dahart 4y ago
Ugh, please don’t make it worse and escalate to “lie”. You’re blaming the wrong source, and have it backwards IMO. The previous owners weren’t lying, the new owners are the ones to blame for breaking a pre-existing contract with the company. Breaking this contract might not be legal, and in that sense they may be only the ones lying.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  If the previous owners were truly committed to upholding the lifetime license, they would have never sold the company without an ironclad legally enforceable guarantee the new owners would uphold the lifetime license as well. They clearly didn't. They either didn't care, or it would have decreased the sale price of the company (or the ability to sell it at all) and they preferred the money. So I absolutely hold the original owners equally responsible. They made the promise and they created the conditions for it to be broken. Which was an entirely predictable outcome, which is why calling it a "lie" doesn't seem inappropriate.
  - dahart 4y ago
    Why do you believe the contract with the customer isn’t legally enforceable? The new owners may just be choosing to break the law because they believe nobody will attempt to sue them over fifty bucks or whatever. I guess you can decide to blame whoever you want, but the legal responsibility for upholding a contract lies with the company, and a change of ownership doesn’t change that from a legal perspective. It also doesn’t change or help anything to make wild assumptions about what the previous owners cared about. You simply cannot control what a new owner does with your company once you sell it, that’s what selling it means. Using words like “lying” when people may have had every intention to meet the contract is just an exaggeratory drain on having reasonable conversation.
    - Veserv 4y ago
      It is absolutely lying. The original owners could have put in a voluntary, irrevocable, liquidated damages clause that is sufficiently punitive that no subsequent owner of the company would think to violate it. As they intend to honor the “lifetime license” for a lifetime and totally do not intend to renege for that duration there is no harm in enforcing that clause with force of law.
      - dahart 4y ago
        You didn’t even consider the question I asked. Why are you making the assumption that sale of a lifetime license isn’t currently enforceable by law? The article only complained and didn’t attempt to challenge their license. Your idea only works if someone is willing to challenge the company. If the new owners of a company are choosing to break the contracts or the law, why would you expect another contract to help? There are a million and one promises companies have made to customers and other companies by the time they are acquired. Installing clauses like you suggest for all of them is wildly unrealistic, would be very expensive in billable lawyer hours, may delay or subvert the sale, and above all may be unnecessary/unhelpful/confusing if the existing customer contract is already legally binding.
rhaway84773 4y ago
I agree. The only time a lifetime license will actually be honored as such is of the company’s product fails and it’s no longer around as a company, so it allows you to continue using the current version as is. When companies that have offered lifetime licenses don’t fail, they inevitably kill the lifetime part of the license by pulling different tricks like, creating a cloud version which now becomes their future version, while the desktop version is no longer maintained, or rebranding the same app as a new app where actual development continues while the old app gets minimal updates at most, or not updating the app with the lifetime license so it works on modern OSes and platforms. If you’re lucky, you may have snagged a lifetime license the company offered early in its life, which it then stopped offering once it started getting successful, so it continues letting you use the lifetime license because the owners of such licenses are few enough that any marginal revenue they may earn by pulling the above tricks is not worth the reputational damage.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  > The only time a lifetime license will actually be honored as such is of the company’s product fails and it’s no longer around as a company, so it allows you to continue using the current version as is. You could also sell mission-critical software with a lifetime license. It just has to be bad enough that it can outlive the user.
m-p-3 4y ago
I'm of the advice that lifetime licenses are only sustainable if they're sold as a way to attract early users, as a way to reward their faith into a product that had chances to fail and see their money gone forever. It shouldn't be a type of license that keeps getting sold once the product has matured and has some brand recognition in order to make it sustainable. If the product can run standalone on the client's computer, make it a license for that specific major version, and sell the upgrade to the next major versions for a fraction of the price. Those who wants the latest features can buy the upgrade and sustain the business, and those who are happy with the current version can keep using their version without feeling wronged.
chung8123 4y ago
You definitely could support a lifetime license if some of the money is invested and used to pay for the upkeep of each license. It is about pricing the model correctly.

JohnFen 4y ago

I don't think I agree with the "dishonest" label, but lifetime licenses are a bit scammy even when they're offered earnestly.

MrOwnPut 4y ago
Could you elaborate? My Plex lifetime license has been very valuable to me and has already saved me money.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Because it's not clear what "lifetime" means. In practice what it means is "until the company is sold" or restructured or whatever. But the implication is that it's for your lifetime. How does your lifetime license save you money over just engaging in a straight-up purchase?
  - MrOwnPut 4y ago
    It's very clear what it means, it means the lifetime of how long you think this product is going to last. It's a decision as a consumer you make. When I purchased the Plex lifetime license 6 years ago, I asked myself how many years to break even vs if I purchased yearly. The answer was 2.5 years. I also asked myself if Plex was going to last at least that long, and I thought they were, and they did, and I wanted to support them.
- yebyen 4y ago
  FWIW, I regret not buying a lifetime Plex license. I am still paying every year.