To be frank, if these purchases are no longer worth supporting, those customers should receive a full refund.
mIRC sales are obviously declining. Author wants to continue supporting it, but the business model no longer works. The options now are:
1) Shut it all down. Author takes a job somewhere else. Product lifetime ends. Lifetime agreement honored.
2) Be honest, admit lifetime agreement isn't workable going forward, and come up with new license terms. Doesn't match the letter of the original license, but project gets to continue and author can continue working on it.
3) Create an "mIRC 2.0" out of nowhere that isn't any different than an incremental update, but gets presented as an all-new product. This is functionally equivalent to #2, but also adheres to the letter of the original agreement.
I don't consider "author forced to work on product in perpetuity at a loss" an option, so I didn't list it here. I prefer admitting that the business model needs to change over shutting down the product or doing name-only new product launches to get around lifetime licenses.
What is unethical, in my opinion, is to continue updating mIRC and not honor the agreement you made with some of your earliest supporters, even if you kinda regret that agreement now.
The author could start a new project, not based on mIRC, and sell that separately.
It’s not defraud if he decides to pull the plug and stop development entirely, but then no one will be able to enjoy it. They could also change the name of the product and loophole out of the situation as well. That’s honestly what they probably should have done given the backlash here.
The whole thing is silly and overblown.
Then declare bankruptcy and to their best to fulfill the obligations then restructure and continue. Basically he took out a loan he cannot repay, which is unfortunate but not unusual. What is unusual is telling the people you borrowed the money from “I realized I can’t pay you back and still have as much profit as I want, so I’m considering the debt to be absolved.”
And this is why DRM (as with mIRC apparently) is such an issue. People should be able to just keep using their version, instead of being dependent on some license server responding properly.
Sure, him selling perpetual licenses was a mistake, but he probably doesn’t have a pot of gold somewhere to refund those licenses. He spent the money maintaining the software. An honest mistake, not some sort of malicious scheme.
I’d be happy to forgive him. If I were still using mIRC, I’d happily fork over another $20.
Edit: actually, thinking about how much milage I got out of mIRC back in the day, decided to buy a new license just to support him.
There seems to be this strong belief on HN that because they're a small time software engineer, that things we all agree would be unethical under the exact same circumstances from other actors ("some sleazy megacorp") are completely ok.
I don't understand why his customers should be forced to eat the cost from his mistake. If a local small business sold me something at a price a little low (so they still made profit, just less than they wanted) would it be ok for them to take the thing away later and demand more money for it?
I'd love to hear you articulate what the difference here is that Megacorps would be expected to catch with their "MBAs and lawyers", but the author of mIRC wouldn't?
That’s an excusable mistake for a small company. Not for a big corporation.
I'm asking that if they do (for whatever reason), that they make their updates available to those who already paid for them (and static file hosting is practically free nowadays).
For the people who don’t want to pay for a new license, the outcome is the same as if he just shut mIRC down: no more updates.
So from that perspective, they’re no worse off. And the people who are happy to pay another $20, they will be able to continue to enjoy the software.
> If a local small business sold me something at a price a little low (so they still made profit, just less than they wanted) would it be ok for them to take the thing away later and demand more money for it?
If a local small business sold me anything for US$20, provided continuous support for it for more than two decades, and then asked if I could pay another $20 to continue to get support for it, I'd tell them it was still at my parents' house and probably got sold in a garage sale years ago.
Nothing I've ever purchased has gotten 23 years of updates and support from its creator, much less something that cost $20, even in 2015, 2005, or 1995 values of $20. Is it normal to receive this service? I'm thankful for the two decades of updates and support, not upset that the author didn't believe mIRC would still be relevant to anyone after nearly a quarter of a century.
that one person trying to make ends meet is sitting on 1.3 million pounds in cash
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
Don't confuse fixed assets with current assets.
"current assets" under English law is either cash or something that can be easily converted into cash
> That the company has something with a book value of £1.3M does not mean that they should be obliged to spend their rest of their lives maintaining mIRC for free.
this is a strawman
Yeah, like owning stock in another company or some other security that can be sold for cash, but not without loss.
> this is a strawman
So is bringing up the book value of a company when we’re talking about running costs. Sure, he could run the company at a deficit for quite a while. But I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to demand.
the liquidatable value is literally how you define the term "current asset" (otherwise the accounts wouldn't balance)
(and if you actually go and look at his past balance sheets it's entirely cash and callable loans the company has written)
> So is bringing up the book value of a company when we’re talking about running costs.
while you're googling "current asset" look up "strawman" too, because this is another
> Sure, he could run the company at a deficit for quite a while. But I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to demand.
and another
Selling lifetime licenses and then canceling them when you realize you want to make more money is a scam.
To quote the top few results I got searching online for "law of frustration":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frustration_in_English_law
> it is "not lightly to be invoked to relieve contracting parties of the normal consequences of imprudent bargains"
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/frustration_of_purpose
> when a later and unforeseen event impedes the buyer's purpose for entering into the contract
https://www.upcounsel.com/frustration-of-contract-definition (emphasis mine)
> However, frustration of contract is not acceptable in all circumstances nor in all types of contracts. It is acceptable when the law finds it unfair to force a party to comply with the contract terms ___due to events that are outside of or beyond their control___.
English law generally accounts for the benefit received. For example, if you buy a physical product that works for only half its expected lifetime, the starting point is that you did receive half of the benefit of the product and so you are owed (the remaining) half of your money back.
Or, put another way, if a product is expected to last a year, and fails one day before that point, you don't get to walk away with most of your money, and the other party nothing. That isn't fair to the other party, who did fulfil >99% of their obligation to you.
What proportion of the expected benefit you received, and other issues such as consequential damages, also get factored into that, of course.
I don't live in England, so maybe it's different there, but in the US you would not be able to claim partial completion of a contract in that case.
Your second sentence is even worse. The pertinent point is that you'd be interfering with his preferred choice to work on mIRC.
Again, this is very debatable.
> One can argue that the original contract is tantamount to a slave contract, thereby null and void at the outset.
"You're shockingly dishonest"
Are your panties truly in a bunch over this thread, or are you just feigning your "shock"? It matters not; either is laughable.
Was it naïve of them? Alas, it was. Is their latest decision detrimental to someone's quality of life? I doubt it.
Alao, I don't know the details in this instance, but a lot of unlimited/lifetime products come with a shit ton of fine print which void the lifetime/unlimited clause. For example, a lot of hosting providers used to give you "unlimited" storage, but excluding media files, or apply "fair use" limitations, etc.