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Comment by lotsoweiners | Hacker News Reader

The best business model.

I am also ok with one like Jetbrains where you subscribe and after a year you can keep the last version you paid for. They do a lot of updates, so the money is going into the product but one isn't forced to stay in order to use it.

Confusing IMO because they use years as the major version. If I subscribe May 24 - May 25 and they don’t release 2025.1 until just after my sub ends…which version do I get?

That said I’m a jetbrains fan and like their recent move to include all features in community editions (need licensing for commercial use obviously)

I didn't exactly know, but found https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Sounds like the fallback license is for the version available on the date the 12 mo subscription started

It's not actually that different from the subscription model; the interval is just longer. At some point, you'll upgrade your computer and find the old version of the app no longer works, and you'll be forced to upgrade. Depending on how quickly the app evolves, you might prefer the subscription model so you can follow new how-tos, and it can be more reliable since developers are only supporting a few versions out in the wild.

I'm not saying you need to be on the bleeding edge, but if any part of your personal tech stack is older than ~4 years, it'll start to have problems, and you're going to be left behind.

Microsoft is very good at backward compatibility. So 10+ year old versions of PerfectTablePlan probably work on Windows 11.

Apple is much less good at backward compatibility. It is a bit of a two edged sword. Customers have to upgrade, you also have to keep updating libraries and releasing new versions to keep up.

I believe it is in this interview from 1996 where I saw Bill Gates saying the same thing about Microsoft products, he saw them as subscriptions. It’s a long but interesting interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFFlO7yBIBM

>At some point, you'll upgrade your computer and find the old version of the app no longer works, and you'll be forced to upgrade.

It comes down to the developers to make sure the older versions are regularly updated and make sure they run on newer operating systems and architectures.

This is why the model doesn't work. You can't support shrinkwrap software indefinitely.

Really? I'm still using sublime 2 from 10 years ago and it still works great across Mac and windows.

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