Hacker News Reader

Comment by mthoms | Hacker News Reader

This is incorrect. Lots of people believe this but it just isn't true.

When your one-year subscription expires you actually have a perpetual license for the first version that was available when you signed up. NOT for the last one available when the contract ended.

In other words, when your one year subscription is up, you have to downgrade to a one year-old (possibly buggy) version.

For more mature toolchains like C or Java, this seems reasonable. For ones that undergo massive updates each version (WebStorm, AppCode) it's a non-starter.

EDIT: on second read, this may have been what the parent poster was trying to say. I'm leaving this comment as-is though because there seems to be a TON of confusion about this point.

View on HN

The OP said:

> you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed

Which is correct, and is the same thing you described.

On second read, you might be right so I amended my comment... In my defense, OP's comment is ambiguously worded. What you actually get is a permanent license to the oldest release available during your subscription. OP also says:

>... after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth."

Also kind of unclear. And judging by the comments here, many many people misunderstand this. I think it's a general expectation that you'd get access to most up-to-date version of the product when your subscription ends. Not the version from the day your subscription started.

Think about it. If there's a bad bug or regression in the old "perpetual" version you aren't entitled to the subsequent bug fixes. Bug fixes which you've been "using" for the past year. It's kind of a hard thing to swallow.

You get the latest version you subbed to. So if you subbed last in 2018, you get that version. If resubbing j. 2019, the 2019 version. Also every year the price goes down, so you pay less and less.

That's misleading. Each year has multiple point releases. You don't get the latest point release.

My PHPStorm subscription expires in less than a week. In order to continue using it (without re-subbing), I have to downgrade from 2019.3 (current release) to 2018.3 (the release available on the date I subbed). Software that is one year old.

Similarly, the JetBrains site says my WebStorm subscription expires in around 10 months. At which point I have to downgrade to 2019.2 if I don't re-sub. Today's current version is 2019.3.

>Also every year the price goes down, so you pay less and less

That part is true and it's certainly commendable that they do that.

I recently renewed my PHPStorm subscription (again). Not because there are hot features released in the past year which I'd miss.

Rather, I thing it is right thing to do - to pay some recurring cost for the software we use and to let the developers of that software to make their buck.

We are too accustomed to get everything for free at the expense of someone else.

> For ones that undergo massive updates each version (WebStorm, AppCode) it's a non-starter

At least you should still be able to open up old projects.

If you use Adobe Creative Cloud, and you stop paying, do you lose access to all your data?

Plus in all honesty, lots of Adobe software behaves like a virus by installing these always running updaters. I haven't had Flash in my laptop for sometime and the web has evolved to a point that it was never an issue, but the CC updater ended up saying I needed to install the latest update to Flash.

I have already tried Pixelmator and the Affinity suite, but after that shady behavior plus the monthly fee, I ended up uninstalling anything Adobe based and just switched completely to Affinity Design and Photo. The only thing I'm missing is when somebody sends me an .ai file in a certain format, but if they export with SVG or with PDF support, zero issues there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com