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Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

It's not really about the culture anymore. Software that requires maintenance — and most does — has a continuous development cost. As such, subscription is the most natural way to cover it.

On the other hand, we have software which has low maintenance cost, but sold for peanuts ($0-$10) in small quantities, so authors try to introduce alternative revenue streams.

As in, it's fair to pay continuously (subscription) for continuous work (maintenance), so I don't expect that to go away. Ads, though, yuck...

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Software sold today does not require maintenance. Software to work in the future requires maintenance. I am not buying future software. I am buying today software.

Increasingly I am not buying software at all.

This is a good argument in favor of subscriptions not being mandatory, but not in favor of the abolishment of subscriptions overall, which is what they were talking about.

That is the old way. You bought some application and it came with upgrades until next major version release or similar. Then when that release came out you could decide to pay again or just keep using the old (now unsupported) version you already paid for.

That solved all the issues with paying for maintenance, but sadly someone must have figured out a mandatory subscription was a better way to make more money.

It's not only a way to make more money, but it also matches better to modern development approaches.

Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release.

Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.

That was probably true a long time ago, but I bought software using that model that did not have any physical releases and at least one had frequent minor releases adding new features.

It seems to me like the "subscription model" is exactly the same, except for the use of DRM and cloud dependencies to force users to pay for new versions. The only thing that changed was that the option to remain on an old version was taken away from users.

On the contrary, software today is so absurdly buggy that it often does require maintenance to work.

Even ignoring security, bug fixes, new features, etc it is also not fair that you can get value from the app every month, but the developer doesn't get to capture a reward for any of this value. Having people pay monthly for value they get monthly seems reasonable.

Does that mean you'd be in favor of subscriptions for owning a vehicle, rather than paying outright? Or a house?

The manufacturer/builder gets paid once, and you get value monthly.

Leasing cars and renting houses is already a common practice. So yes I believe these make sense to exist.

The existence of purchasing cars and houses with no ongoing cost to the builder is due to competition.

Also leasing cars isn't usually (ever?) from the manufacturer of the car.

Houses, not sure how it's done in more populous areas, but around here you don't ever rent from the builder. You rent from someone who bought the house from a builder (or bought from someone who did, etc etc).

I disagree. You can read a book or listen to a record, watch a dvd, unlimited times, having fairly paid upfront a price for the item. A computer is general purpose and lets you check your email every day, hell even lets you create new value in the form of new software, without the manufacturer receiving a royalty.

The idea of capturing reward post-receipt is feudalistic.

The existence of products in competitive markets is not a counter example to what my point was. I recommend looking at the terms bottom up pricing and top down pricing. The former is about creating a price based off of how much it costs to do business and then adding a profit margin. The latter is creating price in line with how much value it offers customers. The existence of products using bottom up pricing doesn't mean top down pricing does not exist.

That's not how markets work (and I disagree that it would be reasonable).

Price is usually established based on how much something cost to make (materials, effort, profit), combined with market conditions (abundance/shortage of products, surplus cash/tough economy...).

If you want to continuously extract profit from consistent use of a hammer or vacuum cleaner, somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.

>somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.

And software like photoshop is not trivial to copy so it can survive being priced based off of value provided. There exists competitors that don't have a subscription, but they are not good enough to kill it.

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