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Comment by davewritescode | Hacker News Reader

Frankly I'm completely shocked to see that mIRC still gets updates.

That said, this is basically what mobile developers do constantly. When you buy a "lifetime" license the software basically gets abandoned and a new version comes out where you get updates.

If you've been using mIRC since 1995 and the developer has been keeping it up to date, perhaps you should be supporting them.

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If I offer you a product, And we exchange money based on my offer of a product for a specific amount of time (In this case lifetime) and I change the deal afterwards, it is dishonest and unethical.

> If you've been using mIRC since 1995 and the developer has been keeping it up to date, perhaps you should be supporting them.

Why? It was part of the financial transaction at the time to have a lifetime license for the agreed amount of money provided at the time. It doesn't matter if it was $1 or $1,000,000. Changing the terms after the fact is dishonest. Full stop.

Seems to me it's fully honest if the original offer was made without any deceit. In fact, acknowledging that the original offer turned out to be impractical is also honest. However, that does not mean that some other criticism or pejorative cannot be leveraged against this action.

It's unethical to offer a "lifetime" license you do not plan to support.

You can plan to support it all you want, but "lifetime" is a long-ass time. You should be humble enough to know that your ass isn't going to be able to cash that check, and avoid writing it in the first place.

Lifetime licenses are just unethical, full-stop.

I suppose it depends on the terms of the licence. I've permanent/lifetime licences for various software, applied to either particular versions or all version released within a year of purchase; this means that the licensed persists indefinitely or until a violation of license (or until rightful transfer of license or voluntary termination of license). I've very few licenses which include all future versions, and those are mostly open-source volunteer projects.

> That said, this is basically what mobile developers do constantly. When you buy a "lifetime" license the software basically gets abandoned and a new version comes out where you get updates.

While I never encountered this (there simply aren’t many apps I use), I regularly encounter this in completely free apps. Like my supermarket’s app. There’s a new version, that’s almost identical, slightly rearranged interface. Only one of them gets updated now. What?

I've done outsourced IT work for a bunch of small companies. What I've seen so often was something like "we had a very talented programming intern who built this whole thing and then (went back to college | got a new job | accidentally deleted the codebase). So this time we went with an agency, but they called all the code garbage and said we need a complete re-write so now we have two systems we're moving between".

It’s one of the biggest supermarket chains in Germany, though. Not exactly a start-up. And it was even very well reviewed.

The larger the enterprise the longer and more distant (and in some cases, more prone to corruption) is decision-making chain, the crappier the contractors ;)

There are obvious exceptions, but that's just how it is in practice.

I think sometimes this happens to reset the reviews. If the score gets to low, they just publish a new app. Or they fix an issue that people have been complaining about for a while. Maybe they want to increase ad spend and those 1 stars from three years ago make it hard to promote?

IME, review resets are definitely part of it, but not all. The other big one is "we lost control of the app namespace when we fired $vendor and while it may be ours (and sometimes we agreed to bad deals where it's not), we don't know how to get it back."

Old app [0]: 4.6 stars 45.3K reviews

New app [1]: 4.4 stars 13.8K reviews

And they also seem to have enough rights left to actually upgrade the old app’s icon with "old app" in German.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rewedigita...

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.rewe.app.mo...

Yeah, never pay for an upgrade is just not a good business model because you presumably have sold to a larger and larger percentage of your potential market over time. Some sort of minor updates are free with discounted price for major version upgrades is a better idea in general.

I wonder how much the US DoD contract for licenses brings in

They switched away from IRC to XMPP.

There’s lots of IRC still floating around the DoD. But yes, XMPP has partially supplanted it.

I've seen XMPP floating around TAK platform as chat service (although apparently one could run chat service directly on the CoT protocol as well)

Weirdly enough for few mobile apps I use I never hit that, I guess I got lucky

Panic Prompt, a pretty good ssh client for iOS, released a 2.0 version that seemed more like a big update to me. I definitely didn’t mind buying the next version, but it did surprise me.

I dunno. I think to some extent it is just the result of the change in how code is deployed — in the past, for consumer software, you bought a program for a version of the OS and sort of expected that when you upgraded you’d have to go find replacements or buy new editions of some software. Nowadays with app stores and these sort of rapidly-updated, never quite done operating systems, you kind of expect updates, right?

I don’t think conventions have been universally agreed on for this sort of thing.

Prompt 2 brought the GPS-powered hack to keep SSH sessions from timing out and that was a major upgrade worth paying for. Also, the App Store deliberately doesn’t have a good way to do upgrades because Apple would rather developers move to the exploitative but lucrative subscription pricing model.

Just to be explicit, I definitely wasn’t trying to criticize Panic. They are sort of a well-known, well-regarded group I think (I was surprised by Prompt 2, but not annoyed by it or anything). I think they make a good example of the fact that a non-exploitive company might want to do this sort of thing.

I wasn’t criticizing you, just providing context for those who don’t know the app.

I am amazed IRC is still a thing people do.

There are not really any clients for XMPP or Matrix that work as well as irssi or weechat for IRC. I also have more issues with servers for XMPP and Matrix (delayed messages, uptime, encryption weirdness). I use things besides IRC, but IRC still gets daily use and is my favorite. I suspect everyone who knows how to make a good client is still using IRC, so they aren't available to make good ones for the newer protocols.

weechat-matrix works pretty well, tbh. but agreed IRC is simpler to get right than XMPP & Matrix. Matrix stability at least is improving constantly though (but agreed it's not quite at the same level as IRC. Turns out decentralised E2EE is hard.)

We’re still here.

https://xkcd.com/1782/

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