I get that these moves make people nervous, and rightfully so. But as it stands every version of 1Password in active development (not including maintenance mode):
* Can be licensed standalone.
* Supports local & Dropbox vaults.
* Was released within the last year, actively supporting those features.
The only feature they’ve actually killed off (by not baking into future clients) is WLAN sync. This is a regression for some, but personally I always found it super impractical.
I agree that how they are going about this doesn’t inspire confidence that these features will remain in the product, but to some extent it does.
While they downplay the hell out of it, 1Password 6 for Windows was a ground up rewrite that ditched local vaults and standalone licensing. Those features were reintroduced in 1Password 7 for Windows, which is a pretty big backtrack for them and requires renewed development effort.
AgileBits doesn’t always make the right decision. They develop opinionated software, like most good developers. However, just like the MAS-only decision they made with 1Password 4 and stood by for some time, eventually they do right by their customers.
1Password 7 for Windows is a great example of that. As much as they would love to go cloud only, they heard the feedback and brought back those two key features. At this point, I can’t expect much more than that.