This person is feeling the dystopia

Contract law is powerful like that. Daddy tells you the deal, you take it when you use the product and/or service and now he can fuck ur waifu.

You signed her away in these here T&Cs.

Products!

Watch it be some rebranded existing FOSS product 😂

Pretty sure they're going to be handling the zombo.com nft sales

J A B B E R W O C K E Y

I am with this person.

I agree with you on this. Lifetime licenses are great, but not feasible for some software. Anything that needs to be constantly updated needs steady income for developers. But, if their updates don't provide anything that you need then you should be able to keep using the version you are on for no additional money.

JetBrains did similar with their perpetual fallback license and it did ok. My only gripe with their strategy was it required either the upfront year paid or at the end of 12 months of month to month you would get the license. Issue was the license was from the first month so you would have to go downgrade. I like your idea way more

Yep, create the problem to sell the solution

It would have happened anyway.

IT, and other industries have the same seasons like fashion.

Oh, look, it's the turtleneck season again!

And people forget it's happened many times before, and act like it's something new every time.

Maybe a software lootbox. So you get a random surprise software, which is worse and more outdated than those on CDs you had glued to magazines.

First question: the fuck are they actually making? They’re so vague about everything except how to pay.

Right. I have boxes full of software I bought once, and I have the license to use it forever. But it's for Windows XP or older. I'd need emulators or WINE to run it now, and it's not really worth it. For some of it I even paid for a "lifetime" of updates, but that stops working out when they stop updating it. I apparently live a lot longer than 90s and 2000s software companies. Just let me pay for major versions again with a guarantee of updates for X years, and price it according to those expectations.

37Signals is the company that made Basecamp, and they talk about hosting the software yourself, so presumably they are writing web software that would often be SaaS and letting you host it. So it's great that you'll be able to get it for one time purchase. But it definitely needs updates, as libraries change versions, new security flaws are uncovered, obviously for bugs, etc. Buying web application software is only as useful as the length of the updates included. Them providing the source is better, but since that's not open source exactly a community couldn't really work together to continue updates themselves.

I think there were probably times where software that got shipped actually worked. So you bought it and you could use it, no need for "maintenance". I generally don't think that's the right word since software doesn't decay on its own, so there's nothing to "maintain" actively. Apart from compatibility of course, but if that breaks (e.g. with newer OS or hardware), it would make sense to pay for an update if you need it. Makes a lot more sense than those disgusting subscription scams that adobe is pulling off (and every other company seems to follow).

37Signals, the company that made Basecamp, is really good at getting news. They're a really small company (less than 30 ppl), but the owners are all big in marketing. So they write books about culture and how to run a business, as well as how to get attention.

This post is again, them finding a way to get attention.

I neither like or dislike 37Signals. I think theyre neat. But I also read their books like it's fantasy, as they are telling the business world how to run their companies while also being such a tiny entity.

well sure, as a user FOSS is ideal, but as a developer it's not ideal you're not getting paid for your software...

Just paying a developer once for software you use seems like a decent compromise