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Comment by grincho | Hacker News Reader

Then charge for bug fixes. Charge for updates that make the application run on a new version of the OS. If those things provide sufficient value, users will pay for them. I've been paying for that for decades for my commercial text editor.

And can subscriptions be canceled in practice? If you cancel your Photoshop subscription, your documents suddenly become unopenable. In this way, software subscriptions—at least for software you create with—are like protection money: "Nice documents there. It'd be a shame it anything were to happen to them."

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> ...we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis. -- Bill Gates (1995)

How would you sell bug fixes? "Hi grincho, how would you like an update for X feature where we fix Y bugs for Z dollars?" Most people would respond by asking why they have to pay more money for things that should be working in the first place. It'll become hard to know whether a developer is fixing new bugs or whether they just wrote some buggy software knowing they'll get more money by selling bug fixes separately rather than writing it correctly in the first place.

Right. I should not have to pay again, or subscribe to some “service” to have the company fix their product’s defects. If I buy a vacuum cleaner that randomly rips up my carpet once every 100 sessions, or a garage door that opens by itself in the middle of the night, I should not have to pay the companies to fix them. This is why we have warranties and product recalls, which are conspicuously absent in the software business.

With subscription based software you effectively are paying them for bugfixes. They just also (potentially) give you new features to justify it.

Charging for bug fixes can also be seen as protection money: "Nice security holes you've got there, it'd would be a shame if anyone were to abuse them."

And no software vendor would like to categorize bugs as security related or not, or maintain and test all combinations of old releases plus security patches applied. The easiest is if all customers stay on top of tree.

> "Nice documents there. It'd be a shame it anything were to happen to them."

When you put it like that SaaS doesn't sound all that different from ransomware.

You should never subscribe to a product that doesn't let you export your data. All the major products do.

Every system is gambled, if you pay for Bugfixes, company's will create synthetic bugs.

Software is crystallized behavior, which rots when not in symbiosis with a developer.

Software developer holds the software ecosystem hostage, trying to extract the maximum amount of value.

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