Paid Cerberus 'lifetime' licenses are expiring
androidpolice.com
androidpolice.com
But what I want to point out is that revoking something that was once promised to users, ridiculous explanations that the company didn't expect their product to last for so long, and finally deleting comments from their forum is a shitty move that Cerberus should be shamed for. As well as everyone who tries to do the same.
So I think lifetime licenses might make good business sense if you know that the service you provide is effectively limited in time by external factors anyway, like for instance a service having to do with young children or education for instance.
In this case for Cerebrus it doesn't really add up though, and the justification given by the support is absolutely baffling to me:
>Quite frankly we did not think Cerebrus would last that long!
Uh, well, kudos for honesty I guess. So what they're saying is that they sold lifetime licenses expecting that they'd never actually have to deal with they because they'd either go under or be acquired before it'd become a problem.
Honestly I think I spent €3 on it, and I'd happily pay that a year to keep using the service. My automated testing-utility probes about 1000 ping/ssh/http services every 90 seconds, and sends me notificaitons when/if anything fails via that application.
Pushover has been absolutely robust and reliable, and although I don't expect instant notification in all circumstances I seem to have received it.
How do you back out of a bad promise made in good faith?
Of course you could also have made a promise with a provision for what happens in case you want to back out (typically with some sort of compensation if appropriate).
I don’t think it’d be that controversial to release a new version of the app with a different pricing model while offering a fair upgrade path to existing users. Only this version would be available on the App Store.
They can choose not to upgrade and the old app will still work just fine. Keeping the servers up for that would be the cost of doing business.
This is more or less what 1Password have done. All their old versions are still usable, you still have the license for an old version because you bought it. Each upgrade is basically an entirely different release that you can subscribe to or pay for.
Cerberus have fucked up by pulling the rug from underneath everyone and revoking their licenses, making the software they bought unusable.
And as a word to the wise, maybe don’t think about making lifetime or ‘free forever’ promises. They’re totally unrealistic.
You received this message because your 1Password subscription has lapsed. While your account is frozen, you can still view all your items, copy your passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account. But you won’t be able to:
Add new items to vaults
Edit items
Invite people to your family or team
Fill items in your browser
It becomes a read-only list of your passwords, instead of providing ongoing service at a fixed version of the software (unlike JetBrains IDEs, where you actually keep fully operational version of the IDE at the latest version you qualified for).
That upholds the promise (you still get whatever you paid for at some point) better than the other legal alternative (shutting down the app entirely, which ends the "lifetime"). If you want to get rid of the dead weight, and it doesn't happen organically, periodically offer specials for customers of the old app to transition to the new one.
What you should never do: take something that is "lifetime" and make it expire. That only demonstrates that you're not trustworthy.
The only valid thing to do is to refund the purchase price. Either all of it, or at the very least the difference between price paid and how much is would have cost to buy the pay as you go license up til now, plus a consolation bonus.
Yes, the app will be functional on Android 8 in 2039 - if you can still find a functional Android 8 device then (after the epoch roll-over).
Basic maintenance helps the app move forward to Android 30 (or whatever is current then), letting you enjoy precisely the features you've bought back in 2017, so to me that seems to be strictly better.
(I exaggerated version numbers and dates to take in the epoch roll-over issue as an outside-anybody's-responsibility issue with an ancient base OS: https://www.quora.com/What-will-happen-to-a-64-bit-Android-d..., but the same scenario also applies when talking about supporting whatever base OS of 2022 and the ways it will or will not be compatible to today's apps)
If you didn't promise free updates/upgrades, you then can sell additional premium services only available to people who voluntarily upgrade to a package that pays more.
The very least that a company that wants to go back on the promise would have to do would be full refunds. It would still be wrong, but the fact that they aren't even giving those out (automatically on cancellation, without asking) shows the lack of good faith.
Bait and switch laws still a thing?
If they took away existing features, or added annoying upgrade nags to the app, that's a different story.
Security patches should be factored into the original cost of the app.
If you decided to not get Pro+ via the lifetime offer, you'll keep all the features you had until now, we're not moving them to the higher plan, only for new users, not for you, never.
I hope it makes sense, let me know if not.
-Petr from Feedly
The legal way to do this is to go bankrupt, launch app 2.0, and market it under a similar name.
They have a ponzi scheme business model, it failed. There's nothing legal about this; you make promises, you sign contracts, you have to live up to them.
We, the little insignificant people, have to afterall. The rules for us and them are the same.
You do this to a few people you lose your shirt, you do this to thousands or tens of thousands, that accousts the public trust. Management should be in handcuffs and in jail for this.
This news site is questionable for calling the business practice "questionable".
This is an easy case for the FTC and state regulators.
There are multiple reasons for that but primary two, that are history proven are:
- I dont trust you
- I REALLY, REALLY DONT trust you
Credentials storage? Any data storage? Yeah right, I have my own server and dont have time to reverse and check your code each update (but I did on first use).
Immediately when you dont support self hosting of my data, you have lost a potential customer, regardless how "good" your application is (typically in this case, it is far from good, developer lacks the knowlidge of how to do it without some major lasigna code on server side or is predatory).
All of application that I have bought are running on complete lockdown from any server (including firebase and other unneeded services) that is not mine. And countless times it was proven as a very good practice.
This is no longer the business model for a vast majority of software development. Now, software is never 'done', but new features are continually added (whether needed or not) and most software requires a large server farm to provide services for the sold software (or the entire offering)... this is both a design decision, but even more so a decision that requires customers to keep paying for the same software as 'support'
Good point - the whether needed or not puts the finger right on the point. The subscription model is funding development of subpar features that aren't needed. This is an inefficiency, and ideally it should be eliminated
Quite a few doctors would sign on the spot for that.
1. software prices were not below coffee prices
2. you got what you bought, you could not and did not expect updates
3. updates and upgrades were not free
Given the number of user-hostile updates that often arrive somewhere along the way, i'd like to go back to not expecting updates. Happy to pay for new versions when new features are enticing enough.
And many devs would be glad to provide that, but the shit-heaps that are "modern" storefront don't allow for it. AFAIK neither Google's playstore nor Apple's appstore allow for upgrade pricing, if you release an update or upgrade every user gets it for free.
Or you have to release a completely different piece of software, pray that it does't get rejected as a duplicate, pray that it doesn't consume a finite resource (like twitter application tokens) and can't offer "upgrade pricing" different from first-purchase pricing because you can't differentiate.
This sort of pricing methods remains fairly common for computer software houses who sell their thing directly.
As cortesoft already noted:> A major difference is that the programs were standalone. Once packaged, the software was done and required no more work from the creators. They would either switch to making the next thing, or making the next version of the last thing (which would have to be bought again).
That is a big reason software was of higher quality. Although the developers moved on the next version or next thing, there was still support.
What I was told as a developer of retail software sold on floppy or CD-ROM in stores like CompUSA, Egghead, Best Buy, and the like is that every time a customer had a problem that they could not figure out themselves in the software or by reading the manual and so ended up calling our toll-free help number, that cost us more than our profit on the sale--in fact, I was told, it would cost us more than our profit on several sales.
This was at a time when only a small fraction of customers had internet access. A larger, but still small, fraction would have modems that they used with some non-internet service like CompuServe or with BBS systems.
This meant that there was no cheap way to get software updates to a majority of customers--mailing them a floppy or CD-ROM would be the only way. There was also no way to get workaround instructions to the majority of customers, other than mailing them via the post office.
Thus it was very important to management that when the software went out the number and severity of bugs was sufficiently low that not many people would need to call help. If the number or severity was too high, dealing with all the calls or sending everyone a new floppy or CD-ROM would probably make the product a net loss.
This resulted in an emphasis on software quality throughout the company. Even if the actual functionality the product offered was stupid, we would make sure it was very good at doing that stupid thing, and that the manual was clear and complete.
Even if we were working on a new product for which there were currently no competitors on the market, and we knew that another company was working on a similar product and it looked like they would get to market first, we'd not cut quality to beat them to market. Being second to market, and so not getting as big a share as we would have had we been first, was better than being first with a product that would kill us on support costs.
Another consequence of most customers not having internet or other online access such as CompuServe or BBS systems is that it was important to get good reviews in magazines such as PC Magazine, Byte, Macworld, since those were the only reviews many potential customers would see.
If your release went out with any noticeable bugs, they would probably get mentioned in the reviews. Even if you did bite the bullet later and send out new floppies or CD-ROMs to all your customers to fix the bug, you probably would not get a second review. People will remember the first review, and your sales will tank.
I think that as a programmer I liked that era better than the one we are now in, for a few reasons.
• I liked the emphasis on quality. If I wasn't happy with my code, management supported making it better even if this would take longer.
• I liked that things ended. When we shipped the product, it was done. I could make a clean break and start working on our next product, which might have nothing at all to do with the prior product.
• If we did decide to do another version, it had to have enough new functions and features to make people with the prior version want to buy it. That was often enough changes to justify treating it as a completely new product which I could completely re-architect if I wanted to.
Why? I just find it offensive and predatory. If vastly more complex products of Pixelmator/Affinity's quality can remain on a pay-once model, then a goddamn text editor can too. Don't give me your pity post about how not switching to a monthly subscription will cause children on the moon to starve etc. It feels like a thin veil upon what often just seems like basic greed.
An optional yearly upgrade model (a major version jump) is also fine, and has been the most common case throughout computing history.
I would even be fine with IAPs presented as completely optional donations. In fact, pay-once + donate-if-you-want would be my preferred model for things like Pixelmator that are still providing free updates for years after my initial purchase.
I'd love to effectively repurchase many times over to support something that I appreciate and use regularly, but at my own pace please, without ever having to worry about being locked out.
Seems to me "I don't pay for it at all" would be the exact opposite of "count on practically forever".
> If vastly more complex products of Pixelmator/Affinity's quality can remain on a pay-once model
Unless they can keep expanding their userbase forever, they can't and don't over the long term (though a relatively high initial price helps there).
Historically this sort of software has relied on "major version" sales to keep revenue flowing e.g. you'd buy version 2, then would buy version 3 for a reduced price, there would be churn (and buying version 2 would entitle you to using it forever) but there's a point at which continuous work requires continuous pay.
Many software houses have switched to subscriptions not because that's fun, but because upgrade pricing was not an option (AFAIK it's available from neither Apple nor Google) and "pay once" is not a sustainable model.
> An optional yearly upgrade model (a major version jump) is also fine.
That's a good model, but AFAIK no appstore caters to it. You can do either subscriptions or "only get money once", the latter only works for software which is essentially not maintained like video games (and even that's not really the case anymore).
They literally touted them at various WWDCs.
As the proper and official way to implement upgrade pricing?
The majority of software has been pay-once (not counting major version upgrades) throughout the history of software, and still is. I just mentioned some major examples: Pixelmator and Affinity, along with Astropad, CrossOver, DaisyDisk, Duet, Final Cut, Motion, Path Finder, Pixen, SiteSucker, Textual, Unarchiver, to name a few from my Applications folder, and also the vast majority of games.
> That's a good model, but AFAIK no appstore caters to it.
Acorn 4: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acorn-4-the-image-editor-for-h...
Acorn 5: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acorn-5-the-image-editor-for-h...
Acorn 6: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acorn-6-image-editor/id1233861...
You may not be able to view the product pages for Acorn 4 & 5, but they show up in my purchase history and I can still redownload them.
There are other examples like that.
If a company chooses to keep its older versions on display they could.
No.
> (not counting major version upgrades)
That's very much a different model. You can't "not count" major version upgrades because that's how you make "pay once" actually work.
> Acorn 4: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acorn-4-the-image-editor-for-h....
> Acorn 5: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acorn-5-the-image-editor-for-h....
> Acorn 6: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/acorn-6-image-editor/id1233861...
That's a hack, which I mentioned in an other comment: the appstore has no support for this model, so you have to release each major version as completely separate software with loss of history, reviews, links, … and you can't do upgrade pricing.
Yes.
> You can't "not count" major version upgrades because that's how you make "pay once" actually work.
Pixelmator. Affinity. Again. Also Panic. Final Cut. Motion. Logic. SiteSucker. Unarchiver.
I paid literally once for them years ago and they're still getting substantial updates and I'm still getting the latest version on every machine, without having to do anything except sign into my App Store account.
Panic even let you receive updates for Coda after they took it off the App Store!
The majority of apps I use are pay-once. The majority of games I play are pay-once. The next most common model is yearly-upgrade (Parallels, CrossOver, Path Finder) or sequel/expansion, but even they do not prevent me from using their older versions if I choose to (system compatibility notwithstanding.)
> That's a hack, which I mentioned in an other comment: the appstore has no support for this model
Yet they are all there on the App Store. I have been using Acorn for years and I was able to choose when to upgrade and I always did. I can still access the older versions; the App Store itself shows them to me in my history. They can still publish the older versions if they wanted to.
> loss of history, reviews, links
New reviews for a new version is how it has always worked for all apps on the App Store, and how it should be, considering how updates sometimes piss users off. Keeping the same history/ratings/reviews across all versions is vulnerable to baits-and-switches.
As for links, again taking Acorn as an example, whenever a new version was available, the older versions mentioned it in an alert and on their product pages.
The Unarchiver seems to be free now but I felt certain I had paid for it.
Free downloads of the older versions here: https://ricks-apps.com/osx/sitesucker/index.html
That this is largely no longer true is itself a problem. Maintaining compatibility (when reasonable) may be more work for the OS vendor, but it creates far less work for all of the individual developers. And reliability for users.
And that's okay. People who bought the software can keep using it and we don't have companies that are forever old hanging onto the market "just because that's what people buy".
That's not to pick on them exclusively: everyone who wants to make a living writing software needs a recurring revenue stream. Even open source developers are starting to get tired of leeches (though it's more on the corporate side in that situation. But barring corporate sponsorship, the revenue is going to have to come from somewhere...)
What about Affinity?
> expect them to move to subscriptions as well.
> everyone who wants to make a living writing software needs a recurring revenue stream.
Why is preying on your current users and pulling a bait-and-switch on them the only option?
If the continued development of a pay-once/optional-yearly-upgrade product really is unsustainable for you, branch out into more products. Or review your expenses. You don't have to live in San Francisco or replace all your computers with the latest Mac Pro.
It's like, "Oh no our single product cannot sustain our extravagances/desired lifestyle, so let's flay our existing flock some more instead of attracting new customers or creating new/better products."
That only delays your demise, because the users will definitely review their expenses.
You can have a recurring revenue stream with pay once software. Every day, hundreds of thousands of new people are born who don't have a license yet!
It's really easy to make the same amount of money with pay once licenses compared to subscriptions: just take the average number of months that someone uses your app, multiply with monthly price, make that the "pay once" price, done! Now you have the same revenue but don't need to charge for subscriptions, and you get all the money up front!
I sell a software product (pay once with upgrades every few years), and every month people show up and buy licenses. My monthly revenue is pretty stable, and I definitely consider it "recurring revenue".
The used to charge $5..$10 for an app. I love that to change to $5 plus $1/year thereafter. I'm not going to notice the $1, and if they have 100K users they've got an excellent reason to maintain it.
But that isn't what has happened. Instead the price has dropped to free, but the subscription has gone up $20/yr. I'm not paying that. I got along perfectly fine without the app before. I am somewhat perplexed anybody does pay that, but I guess there must be some out there that do.
I could buy App A now and buy App B later.
But subscription-based apps/services compete with each other every single month; they are constantly at risk of me cancelling a subscription – and realizing that I can live without it after all – whenever I review my needs and finances.
2015: https://www.droid-life.com/2015/09/03/cerberus-free-lifetime...
A license expires and I am at the sellers mercy whether I am allowed to get it extended. If it were libre I could instead find someone else to give my money to and keep using it.
I want to use my software for something else. Again, I can try offering the company money to allow me to, but if they say no I am out of luck. Instead I can pay whoever I like to implement the necessary changes for me.
Crippled functionality. Again, I can pay someone else to uncripple it and the original manufacturer has to compete with the uncrippled version.
Moving software. That is admittedly only about licensing and kinda unrelated, but similar to the first one.
It is nice that libre software often also is gratis but that is just a nice bonus.
Even if you have a perpetual license valid on any computer, it may still be impossible to move the license/software to different hardware, if you legally can't debug/reverse engineer it and pay someone to fix the incompatibility.
This is not isolated and there are ways of making it work.
If software is free, someone still has to sacrifice to keep it up to date. If you're not paying money for it, publishers will get money in other ways like advertisements, or selling your data.
Most apps cost less than the price of a single meal.
People that see value in something but refuse to pay even the tiniest amounts will always be a cultural amazement to me.
It's a frequent source of confusion, which is why some people prefer other terms like libre software or FLOSS (free/libre open-source software).
The problem extends beyond software. I had a home weather station from LaCrosse Technology that was supposed to provide internet-connected forecasts and alerts for a lifetime.
It turns out LaCrosse didn't mean my lifetime, or the lifetime of the device, but more like the lifetime of a carnival goldfish.
And then report them to your local consumer protection bureau for illegal and/or deceptive practices depending on your country.
As new release dates near, the problem is that the old product has diminished value (or at least is generally perceived to), the new product isn't generating revenues but is generating costs, and the hint of a new release means that the old product has vastly reduced price pressure. The hardware case of this is known as being Osbourned, after Osbourne Computer's ill-timed next-gen product statements.
With subscription service, cashflow is consistent, and is time-averaged over the development/release cycle. From a producer's perspective, this is an upside. For the customer, it's a downside, as risk is transferred, and an inability to make a subscription payment means loss of access to the service.
My sense is that there ought to be a sensible split, where small customers can outright buy product, but large customers (generally, enterprise/government) are on a subscrption basis. The latter have far more consistent budgeting over time, and also comparatively greater negotiation leverage (so that they aren't entirely beholden to the vendor).
Shrinkwrap licensing is actually a very small case of software sales, and is virtually always secondary to subscription, lease, services (contract), advertising, or per-unit revenue models. That last is Microsoft's bread and butter, penultimate, Google, Facebook, and the AdTech-supported Web.
TL;DR: You buy the current release, but there's (possibly) no future.
In the case of the software in question on this thread, the software is useless without the online service.
It's very hard to price a lifetime, one-time-fee license that requires ongoing expenses to provide an online service, in such a way that providing the service in perpetuity is sustainable.
And these people didn't.
Re lifetime licenses, if you offer it for a certain amount of time or until you reach a goal. it can work. At that point, hey! You have funding and you bootstrapped your product/company.
Then you switch to whatever licensing scheme you want.
It would certainly appear these guys did not know how.
I’m having trouble thinking of a significant collection of medium to large-sized successful software companies that still operate that way.
Video Game companies are perhaps a decent example of that model sort of working, except that the industry has a history of constant studio dissolution and poor working conditions.
So, it’s not that I’m assuming you’re wrong, I just think your idea needs to be backed up with some more evidence. It’s easy to declare that everything about the floppy disks in a box software model works fine but I’m not sure reality supports the hypothesis.
I give you money, you give me a CD or a disk or a download with the software on it.
Maybe it doesn't work well with perpetually broken, constantly evolving modern software that is never done.
Microsoft didn't rely on shrinkwrap, but on:
1. Per-unit CPU licensing.
2. OEM contracts.
3. Enterprise sales of an "integrated ecosystem" (a/k/a tied/bundled OS, Office suite, and network / directory management).
Shrinkwrap was just gravy.
Most major software firms are actually consulting companies, with a massive services division: IBM, Oracle, SAP. Saleseforce might be an exception.
There are a few traditionally shrinkwrap firms, of which Adobe is probably the most notable. They've been shifting to subscriptions.
Most current Mobile software dev is based on advertising and/or surveillance capitalism.
If you download the app from their website (not the Mac App Store), then there’s an option in the app to buy a standalone license.
I think this points to another factor (besides the cost of running servers) in why so many apps are moving to subscriptions instead of the old purchase-outright-and-pay-for-upgrades model: the iOS and Mac app stores have never supported that model. There’s no way to offer a discount to customers that are upgrading from a previous version.
Apple introduced app bundles a few years ago, and those can now be used, with the same caveat of putting up the new version as its own app. In this case the App Store itself can do the check for the original version and change the price of the bundle.
It's certainly not ideal, but it is possible. Pythonista and GoodNotes are two that I know of that have used each of these workarounds.
I could maybe accept it if they gave their users plenty of notice, a grovelling apology, and so on, but this seems like an exercise in how to most quickly alienate your customers.
Can anyone recommend a good alternative to Cerberus with similar features?
I switched to the standard Google Find My Device and I've heard the Apple one is good too.
I think Find My Device is mainly a solution to misplaced phones, with limited use as an anti-theft tool.
Not only is this possibly fraudulent/deceptive behavior* but given that their particular service is predicated upon trust we think they should care more about how untrustworthy this makes them appear.
Generally, why would we knowingly engage a seemingly untrustworthy company for a trust-based service?
--- * Although it is a "revocable license" the terms seem to only address revocation due to "good faith belief" that a user has violated the T&Cs. How to reconcile non-violation revocations of those who purchased a "lifetime" license?
Many "lifetime licenses" are a gamble - you risk the product going away if the company goes bankrupt, and you prepay a lot of money. Granted, here, it was relatively cheap, but that doesn't make it OK to revoke it.
Especially since this seems to be a pure money-grab ("we know you already paid, but how about paying a second time?"), not a "company can't afford the burden of legacy customers given a good deal".
What really annoys me is when a company converts an offline app to subscription, like Ulysses. That was super annoying. At $40/y it's a complete ripoff for just an offline note taking app.
It's also annoying when a company doesn't need a server-side component and adds it anyway (like 1Password - possibly to justify the higher price or subscription). I much prefer enpass which just uses your own Dropbox or Google Drive.
1. Severe miscalculation where the costs of lifetime users become significant. This speaks to a business problem, that you have dedicated users but only at a skewed low cost.
2. It becomes a political thing that new leaders can use to “make a statement”. This happens when a lifetime tier doesn’t really cost anything at the end of the day, but killing it sends internal messages about thriftiness or just general statements that it’s a new day.
3. Preceding a downsizing of a business that has fixed costs, like x number of human beings need to support y number of users. Chasing away users to reduce y so you can reduce x as well, and getting the lower paid users out is where you want to bleed userbase.
All of that said — these are all functions of poorly conceived lifetime plans. Lifetime plans where the rest of your model is based on monthly recurring revenue should be treated for what they are, which is marketing. Don’t run them for long periods of time, cap them at a reasonable number of users for the spend, etc. And then if you screw that up, whatever you do as a correction, don’t blame the users and be very upfront.
I also dislike subscriptions, either paying for them or charging them, I'm a traditionalist, pay for the software and you get point upgrades for free.
But my question is, is anyone doing this traditional model with web services? Pay for access to a specific version of a web application, and you get that for a lifetime (maybe with some small maintenance fee for upkeep)? But if you want to upgrade to the v3 of the web application, that's a new fee?
Is anyone doing this? Is this workable? I might want to try it for my next project but am wary of pitfalls.
As a user, issuing a chargeback was a last resort if merchant was giving me the run around. Haven't issued a chargeback on a purchase years old, but have done so on one from a travel/airline site about 3-6 months old.
They've probably spend enough of their own money supporting it already that it came to this (Wish businesses were more transparent about it). Startups and small companies are hard things to support with hard (sometimes unsavory) decisions to make.
IMHO courts should force the vendor to honor the contracts or as a compromise refund the money payed initially when people bought the license
If the company goes bankrupt so be it, no one forced them to give out lifetime licenses.
IANAL, but what would you go to court for? Deceptive practice? This is an app, nothing important that caused me undue harm. Just find alternatives.
> If the company goes bankrupt so be it, no one forced them to give out lifetime licenses.
Seriously, you would rather an app you found useful to go bankrupt and forced to find alternatives than to pay to support it and not find alternatives? Sheesh.
False advertising and breach of contract sound like the first reasonable steps. Yes, it would be more time than it is worth for a single user. This is exactly why class action lawsuits exist.
I expressed my preference to pay if I were in the same situation as it is not worth my time. If it is something that causes me harm and/or disproportionate burden then it is worth going to court.
> Four years after Cerberus made headlines when it invalidated free lifetime licenses, the device security app is back in the spotlight for the same questionable business practices.
I get it that you want to reframe my comment so you have something to bash at, but the fact is I referred to a portion of the article. Not only did I say I value my time, I made no value judgement on your beliefs or how you spend your time. If something is not worth my time (harm/disproportionate burden), then I will not pursue it and will look for alternatives. What is so unreasonable about that? That I don't want to be negative as you said here? Not interested.
I do believe that If I found myself in this situation I would be finding alternatives and paying for a better provider than to be angry. Legal methods are used only in the case of a substantial dispute as it is a time suck.
Anyway, like I said I value my time and lots of others do too. I never made a value judgement on your beliefs or time.
I would look for alternatives, but since the fee is not unreasonable, I'll pay for it. That said, the way they conduct business is shameful.
"To give users an option to have a thorough protection, the Play Store app displayed a message informing that the full-featured app could be installed as an update from our official website. Apparently even that is not allowed by Google, so they removed Anti-theft from the Play Store."
Oh, I get it. When they said "lifetime license" they meant Cerberus' lifetime, not the user's lifetime. They just somehow survived longer than they thought they would.
/s
Oh, and thanks to Trump, words like genius, fact and perfect, no longer have any substantive meaning either... What a bizarre world we now live in...
That said I do think the developers aren’t communicating well, which is leading to the upset customers. Seems like they should have said after some point they would be changing to yearly billing.
I get to keep my old account the way it was but if I decide to upgrade I have to pay which is reasonable since the service has been upgraded significantly.
If it's bad business to honor their own promises that's the company's own problem.
Free software is in this day and age not sustainable and using it it without contributing a dime is parasitic and detrimental to the health of the sw industry.
A lot of so called “free” software is alive and kicking strong because it is funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition.
In a sense using VS Code or VS Codium is just as bad as relying on an obscure SAP module. We should all support small and medium sized SMEs like the creators of Sublime Text.
While I do agree that people deserve to be paid for their work, blaming others producing a superior product for free is not a sane worldview.
You should donate to free software, tooling etc you use and pay their developers a decent wage like that.
And if you're a maintainer for a free software, start to charge corporations for support. That's the only way you can convince them to part with their money.
Donations do not work and developers should not be forced to beg. FOSS is a broken model for all of us. At the end of the day you are feeding the behemoths one way or another.
That is completely untrue. Merely using free software has no negative effect on it's continued development.
Even filing issues and bug reports are contributions if they are of high enough quality. And in fact, many projects allow you to buy support or new features for money.
>funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition.
That's also untrue. Companies profit in a myriad of ways by providing their software as free software.
EDIT: to the flagged reply below:
- OpenJDK is currently funded by Oracle
- start with these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics
That’s a perfectly valid business model for open source software and there are people and companies using it.