The good thing about desktop software is if the vendor goes away, the software still works.
Not too keen (as a customer) on putting my time and effort into a SAAS hobby project that doesn't scale.
Not too keen (as a customer) on putting my time and effort into a SAAS hobby project that doesn't scale.
Of course unlike SaS you can always continue to use an old version indefinitely in a VM if it really matters.
But I find the longevity of the vendor is still critical for supporting new environments and API requirements, and in practice I don't end up discounting the going-out-of-business risk much for desktop apps vs. SaS apps.
Doesn't it run under emulation, like virtualbox, or even in WINE98 or such?
It's continued to run for 30 years, and they wouldn't dream of replacing it. I don't think they're an exception (although I suspect this is less true when you get out of the enterprise environment).
I've seen projects where this kind of environmental coupling led to the developer not even bothering to open source their work, since they knew it would take too much for others to use the code.
Deprec + Capistrano makes this very close to a reality for Rails. It has some niggles -- like installing virtually everything from tarballs when I would strongly prefer it apt-get everything so that I could get updates and so paths and configuration files jelled well with what Ubuntu expects -- but it has been, and continues, to be a lifesaver for me in getting new projects up to speed.
You can also do one step deploys and automate a lot of cruftiness. (I can do upwards of forty deploys to my staging server in a day when in development mode on Twilio integration -- which is hard to test without actually having an accessible HTTP server and making phones actually ring -- so I have a script which commits my changes, tags a new staging release, and pushes it to the staging server in one command.)