@oldrawgabbit You didn't own that software any more than you do today. You bought a license for use then, you buy a license for use today.
The cold harsh truth is that nobody is willing to pay the prices today they paid for software then. Software was expensive back in the day, it's cheap as hell today - that's the part you conveniently leave out.
@thomholwerda @oldrawgabbit for what it's worth, in commercial software, it's just a way to increase prices and put us on a train of feature improvements we wouldn't have otherwise paid for.
@rhsanborn @thomholwerda @oldrawgabbit That always happened. Back in the day, you'd have to spend $400 every year for the new edition and wait for it to arrive and then go through an hours-long install and upgrade process that could cause serious issues (so you had to run extensive backups first).
Today, you just pay $10/month and it's all handled for you.
@rhsanborn @LouisIngenthron @oldrawgabbit Except revenue has gone down. Software is cheaper than ever - even with subscriptions.
@rhsanborn @thomholwerda @oldrawgabbit Yeah, and then you built your entire business around the bugs and flaws in that version and when it finally gets to the point where it only runs on operating systems that are no longer supported, the company either goes under, or pays someone like me $50K to fix the problem they created by not updating to save $400.
@LouisIngenthron @thomholwerda @oldrawgabbit importantly, if you didn't want to spend $400 because the features weren't compelling, you just didn't and kept running the 3 year old version that had everything you needed. They ran out of valuable improvements that compelled anyone to buy their stuff based on features so they had to trap the market in subscriptions to keep their revenue consistent.