You will own nothing and be (un)happy
racc.blog
racc.blog
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.
Not anymore, and it shows
This explains a lot about why subscriptions have become the norm.
Look at how bad Adobe Acrobat got before they even started thinking about subscriptions.
Netflix is a good example. You can watch as much as you want for a flat rate, but how many people watch enough to justify the monthly fee? (Putting aside the question of whether watching so much is actually a benefit in the first place.) Companies recognize the distinction between potential use and actual use, and so in practice, many are paying more for less and subsidizing the outliers that consume more. When actual use exceeds predicted use, the company will raise the price of subscription.
Subscriptions make sense for situations where there are regular maintenance costs or where the benefits are received at a steady and proportional rate.
I think your technical sophistication means you're somewhat out-of-touch with what "most" people do.
Most normal people watch Netflix/HBO/etc on smartphones/tablets, or stream devices like Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast puck, Apple TV cube, or the "smart tv app" built-in with their Samsung or LG tv. All of those "mainstream devices used by most" don't make it easy to access torrenting sites or files. Sure, one could hypothetically sideload a torrenting app on a Google Chromecast but now you're beyond the demographic of "most people" because you have extra complexity of also adding some USB storage to save the torrent or point to a local network share.
The type of situations that makes "torrenting more convenient" are people watching everything on a laptop or have a dedicated HTPC media server hooked up to their tv.
I'm technically savvy and it was not easy to sideload Kodi player onto Amazon Fire Stick to legitimately play DVD ISOs. It required a lot of google searches to finally figure it out. (E.g. after realizing VLC app for Fire Stick doesn't work, and then finally stumbling across a "developer setting", and then getting the SMB network path correct, and so on...) Thinking that most people could just torrent is being unrealistic.
You are probably right I'm out of touch with technology, but I also think that many people do much more advanced technical stuff like using VPNs - became pretty mainstream.
Ok, explaining your situation with a laptop clarifies where you're coming from. (Which my prior reply anticipated and covered in my 3nd paragraph about torrents being easy for people using laptops.)
In any case, most normal people do not use AirPlay from their laptop, nor cast from a Chromebook, nor cast/mirror a Windows to their tv to play Netflix/HBO/Disney. Instead they just use the mainstream hardware streaming devices or the built-in tv app. Torrents would be much less convenient for the way most non-techie people watch tv (Roku/FireStick/SamsungTVapp/etc). Netflix has stated many times that the majority of their customers' watch time comes from smartphones/tablets/tv and not desktop/laptop web browsers.
If people pirated on a mass scale, the losses would add up. Whatever you may think about streaming platforms, don’t punish the people just trying to make a living.
I play for a TON of services. Just not streaming.
I also couldn't care less about copyright and all that stuff.
> Subscription-only will seem great for a while
The ayes have it. Motion passed, now let's discuss the subscription tiers. How many stickers should we include with the premium 'founders' subscription tier?
> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade
Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.
Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors.
Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.
I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".
I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.
It’s sad, really. Adobe’s apps are powerful, yes, but they’re stuck in time. They perform horrendously and have terrible UI/X that aren’t even standardised between apps (even something as simple as the icon for their own assets library cloud is not the same between apps).
How I wish someone would come along and eat Adobe’s lunch to force it to pull itself together for once, but alas, that’s unlikely at best.
I foresee a lot of smaller actors switching to Affinity in the future, just like tons of people went to Canvas.
Affinity is nice, and I really do wish they would corner Adobe a bit more so they could get their act together. But the fact is Adobe has encroached upon every corner of this industry, pretty much all of their apps are the standard tools for any given design job (from both a software and hardware perspective). It would take a massive amount of effort to convince designers used to Adobe’s tools to switch to an unproven new tool, and it would take an even bigger effort to actually make these new tools become the standard.
I would love to give Adobe the boot, but the truth is that no one has been able to meet Adobe’s apps head on as of yet.
Now that Affinity is free, you will have many more clients and small studios sending you material in their formats.
As for Canvas, I expect every pro studio to be able to work with that format, since legions of clients will make their stuff in Canvas and send it to you and vice versa.
It's like Visa and MasterCard. You don't have to pick only one, and if you're smart you will accept both.
The truth is Adobe has a massive upper hand here in both market share and public perception. Affinity’s offerings might be 100x better, but they will never be “THE Photoshop”—that’s how deep Adobe’s claws are buried within this industry.
Now, they're often dreaded, pushy, and frequent.
People will still buy smart phones, but I think their will be less enthusiasm for the latest and greatest model.
That's your decision. I've published an music album on Bandcamp. You can buy it, I'll send you a real physical tape and you can _download_ high quality FLAC you own then.
If you like to own things, you have all the possibilities.
But I agree, we maybe tend to forget about high quality stuff, if we consume conveniently low quality streaming content for example on Spotify.
> You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore
This is the more general statement, once again, alternatives exist. I own almost all my apps and tools, and 100% of my music. Either because they are free, or because I bought them. Sometimes I’d would be easier to go the other way, but it’s still (mostly) a choice.
If I have a working binary that does not need internet, it cannot become a subscription.
If I have invested in making open source solutions work, then I can also figure out ways to continue to own my tools, even if the company goes the subscription way.
(Also I like working offline when I can. Less distractions.)
"binary that does not need internet"
Pluton chip and signature/attestation requirements have entered the chat.
And there are also tons with no forced or any AI (though plugins by the community kinda to show that many users do want AI)
Bandcamp is a real treasure for this reason. It and buying physical CDs are the only ways I buy music anymore. Streaming is for suckers.
I can not copy and redestribute copies. I can not play it in public spaces for an audience with further ado, etc.
The concept of owning is, rightfully, changing. We are a lot of people who use this planet, and the purist view of ownership simply does not make sense.
You can not own a part of a river to dump chemicals, just for thst to flow to the next owner down stream.
Ah that can of worms. When i would play music out loud in the office, the company has to pay a fee to the copyright reimbursement foundation and a fee to the same system representing the artists (actually the studios, but semantics). And that would be for every employee no matter who heard it and if it was audible in public spaces they count for the max allowable. And that comes on top of the fee I'm already paying (double tax, yay). There is a reason most companies pretend they don't know about this system or ask you to use your own devices and headphones.
There were many employees of APRA doing this, in every state, and many cease+desist/lawsuits.
The case was clear cut - you play the music, you paid a fee.
(I guess many countries have similar organisations)
This is a bizarre statement. On the one hand, property rights are considered a fundamental human right, and for good reason. And on the other, digital goods don't take up space - no matter how many copies exist. What bearing does the number of people on the planet have in light of this?
All I see is excuses for exploitation by our corporate overlords.
> I bought the previous “lifetime” version of the app, but for WHAT, since I have to pay for the subscription to access the newest features.
Yeah, that's how "ownership" works. When you own something, nobody else changes it–for better or worse–out from under you.
That is certainly not a requirement for "ownership", no.
> And, if you stop paying after you "upgraded" the license, you lose access to the thing you bought?
What part of "nobody else changes it–for better or worse–out from under you" is unclear?
For software I wouldn't expect new features but bug fixes seem almost legislatable.
You would buy a product, and it would give you access to the thing you purchased at that version number plus a number of versions afterwards. Pass that point, you needed to buy it again. I think it is a good compromise between "I own the thing I paid" and "I have to give lifetime support for people who purchase an item once many years ago"
I think we should strive to avoid playing this game..
But in the end i feel in this particular case, it’s ops fault. He can avoid using that app there’s a world of alternatives for writing apps and organizing apps.
(is fully closed source software development even still a thing? is there any popular propriatary programming language / editor / runtime / ecosystem?)
However Visual Studio and Xcode are closed source and still popular in some circles.
Most people will still be relying on open source libraries while using those platforms though.
Copyleft free software licenses such as the GPL explicitly grant anyone the right to use the software for any purpose, as long as they also extend this right to their own software. The intent of this license was to infect any novel software built upon GPL-licensed software, forcing it to become free as well; in practice any organization who wants to build a proprietary app or service simply avoids GPL dependencies (or blatantly violates the license terms). Empirically, software companies care more about avoiding being forced to release the source code of their own proprietary software more than they care about using the exclusively-GPL'd software commons as a dependency, and this isn't a problem the license itself can solve.
I'd suggest using AGPL instead of just GPL.
Conclusion is that gpl but only for non-commercial does not work. They need to use a different license to get something self-consistent.
I don't think it's that bad. Most commercial enterprises don't want their commercial products to be under GPL terms, so they'll pay for the license regardless. You should really fix the SaaS loophole by using AGPL instead though.
I'm genuinely asking. I'm (finally) making my own app without the VC crap, and my best-case scenario is to sell for a fixed price with no plans to upgrade/upsell later. But the app isn't yours, no, since I'll have to deal with the servers/support/admin/taxes on my end. You're buying a license to use it. Is that not ok?
Let's say you publish a blog post guide on how to set up a MySql cluster and I use that as part of DevOps contract work for a company. Do I owe you money?
What if I form an opinion because of a political piece you published then produce my own blog post?
AI use of public data to produce new information is exactly what we do as people.
Only in private. Copyright law can give the owner exclusive rights to perform a song publicly. If the lawyers can convince a judge that your singing counts as a public performance you can end up on the hook for not getting or being covered under a performance license.
https://lawwithmiller.com/blogs/copyrights/cover-me-im-legal...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote
I think your copyright argument is focused on media, like music. This appears be a specific exception that applies to text. Music sampling for example is a direct copy of the recording but quoting text, even though it's a copy, is a new work because although the words are the same it's not the original copied (as in the quote is written or typed by OpenAI).
Because if you ask for an opinion on a subject it generates new information itself based on the data gathered.
It does sometimes quote sources, which are properly noted and attributed, but how is that wrong? People write books (for money) all the time and reference sources.
I'm not understanding why you think the LLM is different from a person in how it uses information to produce new work.
I mean the degree of use or exchange should matter.
Things that come to mind:
- adding 'account required' screens so information is harder to access
- harvesting/selling that ip without your explicit consent (although you agreed in the TCs)
I gave an example of where I'm using your info for my benefit in a different community.
Why does it matter that AI is in the same community, doesn't that actually help my argument because its information is more public?
A third party coming in and saying "hey, everybody stop talking to each other, just talk to us and we'll intermediate and eventually replace every interaction between you, and charge money for it, and fill it up with advertising and eventual enshittification" is not aligned with my goals there at all.
3rd parties can still come in and try to offer value. But they can not sit between your interactions as clients are interchangeable
No one is forcing us to exclusively provide information to AI
AI isn't the sole source of information nor are you forced to use it.
The internet is already full of advertising and shit
I mean, it's now embedded in all our search engines, so it's kind of hard to obtain information without invoking the hallucination-generating machine
Parent said:
> A third party coming in and saying "hey, everybody stop talking to each other, just talk to us and we'll intermediate and eventually replace every interaction between you, and charge money for it
which doesn't seem to be the case in forums and message boards.
It's like pre installed apps or forced browsers, they cause a pushback where the arguments are all monopolistic but the reality is user annoyance.
Now even hardware things that used to work for decades need apps. Some guitar pedals need apps to operate. The first generation of those has already become paper weight: after Digitech was bought by Samsung, all the app servers died.
Apps that need a server are never for my behalf, they are purely for creating a dependency. The real feature is allowing an actual backup of the data.
Streaming has the even worse issues. It promises to pay creators, but after listening to only two bands in a month, as an experiment, no visible fraction of the $10 didn’t went to neither of those bands. It probably went to some major label, of course.
I am 100% disillusioned on anything touched by tech and see piracy as a way to resist this crap. So far only piracy has been reliable in having things work as they should when they should.
In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.
I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.
And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.
Besides convenience there is politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?
So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).
I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.
I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
In Germany we can't really torrent from home, so those sites are very widespread. People just watch stuff at work during lunch, after hours when waiting for a colleague to finish, etc...
I'm not gonna pay for Amazon because it's Amazon, or Disney because it's Disney. And I'm about to kill my Netflix, since it's also complains about Apple Private Relay which I'm not gonna turn off as much as I also hate Apple.
Funny enough, even the CTO of a past company I worked was back into piracy, even after his company had a successful exit. People are just tired of those services, period.
The problem with paid upfront and paid upgrades was that it eventually resulted in bloated programs because the only way to continue having a business was to add features.
Subscriptions, in theory, could leave the focus on user experience and fixing bugs, because in the end the people who are paying are those that like your product as it is now.
Now of course this optimism was misplaced. Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
> Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
Constant internet connection permitted that. Cloud is only a convenience: you don't have to install and update anything locally, it is updated centrally for everyone by knowledgeable admins instead of some users having problems locally and needing support for each upgrade.
I know this from experience, one company has a local desktop version of our product, but they complain that it requires work from administrator, because users can't upgrade their desktop clients automatically, so they want local-hosted webpage version. This is SCADA system for district heating.
Normal internet users don't want to deal with local-hosted own servers, they want to press a button and it should work. Cloud based systems make that a little more possible.
On a technical level yes. But unless you are selling expensive hardware widgets it can be hard to justify constant upkeep cost of servers without a recurring revenue.
That said I too lived through hosting on premises web services that we later pushed to cloud due to the hassle of maintenance. Self hosting is great when you have a dedicated team to keep it running.
We can build today complete products with nothing paid on the tools. This was NOT the case 30 years ago.
You're setting yourself up for failure from the get go, stop chasing gadgets and 99% of your problems will go away
why not to use actual notepad instead?
It's instructive to think on how this was done in the pre-computer era. We used ring binders, which allow one to easily re-order pages, and group them by subject.
> They run out of pages precisely when you forget to bring another one.
The tablet equivalent is running out of battery when you need it the most.
And if you use your tablet regularly, you tend to recharge it every night, and they tend to last all day long. I literally can't remember the last time my tablet ran out of battery. They're not like phones in that way.
In the US, at least everywhere I went to school, the loose three-hole pages were strictly for homework, so you could hand it in and then put it in your binder once you got it back.
Notes were almost always in spiral-bound notebooks so you could flip the left side underneath, so it wouldn't take up as much space and it could angle it well for writing. A few people would use glue-bound notebooks that couldn't, but those were usually much smaller for that reason (and often more expensive).
Would you take each sheet out of the binder before writing? It seems like that would be the only way to do it, otherwise it slides around too much?
Working in retail 1998-2004 (I've taken no notice of how much things may have changed since), the ring binders and paper pads were piled high and sold in huge numbers at "back to school" times. Full pallets of the paper in the window displays at Woolworths.
> Would you take each sheet out of the binder before writing?
If using the cheap crap paper sold by many shops, that could only feasibly be written one side, then yes I did, I'm left-handed so the rings were in the way! Right-handers generally didn't. I suppose the answer is "sometimes". I don't think it slides around. I find the same problem with a spiral binding - too difficult to write at the left edge, and no option there to move the paper away. A weird problem that at least we don't get with tablets.
You also mentioned earlier:
> the holes rip easily on thin note paper
Yep, tell me about it [4].
Also, an open ring-binder is wide. In school you'd sometimes have to tuck the end under that of the person sitting next to you.
But as cesarb said a few posts ago, they "allow one to easily re-order pages, and group them by subject." All options have their pros and cons, we just attach different weights to them.
Examples from a quick search: [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005QZM9RQ - "pages designed for easy tear-out". [2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00COM8XW4 [3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006O8AAZC [4] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00F895JWW
Physical media is great but it's also messy.
When I'm talking productivity I'm including things like "it lets me keep notes of what I was doing in Else Ring so I can pick my playthrough back up easily".
Not all productivity is capitalist.
When I pay for subscriptions, it tends to be for ongoing access to content (music, movies, etc) or infrastructure (storage, server usage, etc). Often that stuff comes bundled with proprietary software but if anything I would much rather it didn't and I could just interact with the content/infrastructure using open source software.
I'm not generally thrilled to be paying a subscription for content, which I would rather own, and indeed I am getting more and more into taking ownership over it. But admittedly there are other benefits to things like music subscriptions, like discoverability and the fact that you don't need a load of storage.
Note taking apps are something I see discussed a lot on HN and there seem to be loads of fancy subscription based services in that space. I don't get it at all - I use Joplin to keep notes and already I feel like that is an over-engineered solution and am considering just going back to text editor + .txt/.md files.
> The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them
They are also not subscription-based. You get to keep what you pay for. You have a perpetual license to use it. We can quibble over licenses, but in effect, you keep what you bought forever.
Yes, if you want upgrades, you then need to pay for that, and that's where it starts to resemble a subscription. But, it's literally a "You keep what you bought" model. They let you use a years worth of upgrades and then you can decide if you want to pay to keep those upgrades. Which, frankly, is incredibly fair in my book.
Again, I realize this is not the point of your comment, but your Jetbrains remark spawned this line of thinking related to the context of subscription based software.
In the little software business I have been working towards creating, my desire was to offer a educational product for aspiring programmers as a monthly subscription.
Then, once the subscription product is paying the bills and successful, create a single seat offline version of the software and sell that as a package with a book. The book would be a user's guide for the programming language with fun example programs to type in suitable for families and schools who don't have internet to connect to my site.
I have planned networking and sharing features for the online edition that the offline book edition wouldn't have, so there'd be an incentive to pay the subscription to get all that. Nevertheless, I feel an offline version should be made available with a perpetual license in case my company dies, taking the website and web-based programming environment with it and leaving people with nothing.
I think I'd settle for a well-documented plugin API? This used to be more or less the dominant model before everything moved to the cloud
Just stop using proprietary software, as it is never possible to own it no matter how much money you pay.
FOSS solves every software need I have, and likely for most people that choose to invest in learning it.
Today alone I payed something like 20% extra because I didn’t want to download an app to pay for parking (other parking places won’t even accept payment without the app) and I had to download a closed source app to activate a sim card.
Generally I only carry cash, a mechanical watch, and an ID.
For banking I use webapps.
For parking I choose lots that accept cash even if I have to walk a bit more.
Never stopped me from doing anything I wanted to do in the SF Bay Area.
Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard, sometimes I give up and order it online. But the more people do this the more it will (continue to) be a supported use-case.
I've had some interesting conversations, interacting with people in the real world, just by going into a store and telling them I'm trying to find a thing. I tell them what game I'm playing, they're usually pleased to hear it and happy to help if they can.
I'm too busy right now, but I think my medium-term plan is to get a local bank and just use them locally like the old days. I'm stuck on iPhone for a variety of reasons, but I'd still like to get my app count down as much as possible. Plus if my phone falls into a river I'll still be able to do my banking. I think the convenience hit will be worth it.
I basically firewall stuff like the bank apps and other stuff on my phone. My PC for the most part is just Debian Linux and my car is an older vehicle that can be literally repaired indefinitely due to it being more utilitarian.
I co-run two tech companies in silicon valley, maintain several online communities, organize events, have an active social life, travel a lot, have many tech hobbies, go to shows and events, etc.
I am hardly the amish person people tend to imagine.
FOSS software can work for virtually anyone in the modern world that wants freedom.
everyone who is able to dedicate some spare time to it
So maybe 5% of the population on a good day.
If you think this is something anyone can Just Do if they decide to do it, you have fallen pretty hard for a certain kind of capitalist propaganda.
Now, I hate subscriptions as much as the next person, but I can’t leave this blog without feeling that the op is a bit entitled.
For what it matters, my opinion is that GoodNotes is doing everything correctly. If you bought a 5 lifetime, you can still use it. It’s the same app (that’s interesting, there is a toggle to go between 5 and 6) so I’m assuming it’s still getting bug fixes for new os releases and similar. 5 was a free update to 4, and 6 was released in 2023 (!) so that license was good for a while. They offer discounts if you bought 5, so op point of it being cheaper on a subscription might be wrong. And according to their website they still offer lifetime licenses for 6, bar the AI stuff (which is probably an ongoing cost for them? No idea if it’s local or not).
Plenty of scammy apps and it would be nice to go back to owning things, but this is the same experience if not better to when you could buy software on a cd and keep it a couple decades ago.
Not a bit. Extremely entitled. The OP even believes that if they bought a permanent license, they should be entitled to upgrades forever. I really wonder what the mental model of business looks like in their head.
I think the op is likely poorly wording their feeling or perhaps are early in exploring their frustrations. They may sound entitled because of this. Their intuition does ring true however. Its 2025 and we are talking a notes app. Handheld pdas had notes applications in the 80s why on earth would we need a subscription let alone dozens of competing subscriptions to take notes. OP will probably find they can get what they need from copy left software and happily ignore this noise in time.
There's really no excuse if you're talking about notes.
In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.
It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
Not really, perpetuities have existed for a long time in finance, even longer has the concept of ‘time value of money’ existed.
You can turn $3m in revenue today into a US treasury bond portfolio that delivers $120k a year. That’s enough to pay for maintenance and minor development of new features.
You can also say: I’ll just charge 120k a year in fees infinitely. But it has the same present value (see time value of money) as 3m today. These worlds are interchangeable, only in the upfront world there is no risk that some of your customers walk away at some point making further upkeep untenable for the remaining customers.
I have since gotten Mediamonkey 4 and Mediamonkey 2024.
Unfortunately I don't like the 2024 refresh, but I can use it if I want to. I would also be completely happy if they just did maintenance/bugfixes on the original version.
I don't know when the OP bought his app, but the pricing page from a year ago doesn't say anything about the lifetime purchase being a subscription at all, much less a subscription that includes every new feature in perpetuity.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240712162421/https://www.goodn...
Updates should be free, but upgrades don't have to. That's how it worked with software previously. Sometimes you could buy older version of e.g. Office used, and that part we lost with downloads and app stores.
The app store model just sucks for every one. Developers needs to resort to subscriptions, because upgrade pricing isn't supported. Consumers are confused, because why are there multiple versions of the same software?
One issue I do see in this case is that Goodnotes aren't offering a subscription free alternative. That might be due to the AI feature. If that isn't running on device, then that's a recurring cost they placed on themselves.
I would also reconsider HW manufacturer that tries to push Newspeak "side-loading" instead of "installing".
I just wish the file sharing things didn't feel so entrenched. I think it's only a matter of time before Dropbox becomes unavailable or no longer offers a free plan (plus it's already restricted to 2 or 3 devices). Using Apple's thing feels unnatural on my Windows PC, using Microsoft's feels unnatural on my Apple devices, using Google's feels like it would require a separate app on every device and you'd still end up in the (imo unnatural feeling) web interface a lot.
However taking music as a counter point, my life is much simpler and cheaper now I can play any song I like, any time, on any device. I don’t “own” the songs any more, but in practice that doesn’t matter at all to me.
The crucial factor here is competition among providers. If there is no competition, providers can lock people in and bump the price.
But with music, in particular, we have many options and the pricing is very reasonable.
My conclusion is that ownership/subscription is a debate that may be framed wrongly and actually it’s competition/monopolies that we should care about
Install F-Droid.
Have a wide array of apps that are free as in beer as well as in freedom.
You don't have to use rent-seeking proprietary junk. There's alternatives out there.
I always say that "Privacy is for Nerds", guess I can start adding Ownership as well.
Side note: I'm not such a fan of FOSS, free for all get it here no conditions and no questions asked, when we're actually just giving away our mind for free. That's fine as long as others reciprocate, but many don't. The few who reciprocate might be worth it. In essence you're trading between minds, which is the payoff then, not the money.
I'm not for or against, just thinking out loud.
Matching different payment models is pretty common in business, not some weird thing that only applies to software. A buffet takes a fixed price per customer, and tries to match it to the actual amount of food the average customer eats. A bank (at least in pre-fiat currency) takes money for short unpredictable periods of time and lends it out for long fixed periods. A hotel takes a variable price per night and matches it to their fixed cost of rent, maintenance and cleaning. An ISP takes a fixed monthly fee, and tries to match it to how much data transfer the customer causes and where the data is flowing. An airline takes a variable price per customer and matches it to their largely-fixed cost of flying the plane. And these new-age software companies take a fixed monthly fee per user and match it to a one-time development cost.
There was the original domestication, and then there's the modern industrial process of plantation management, picking, shipping, and distribution.
All of which has to be invented, implemented, and organised.
You can - and probably should - question the ethics of same.
But that doesn't change the fact that most places that want bananas do not have have bananas, and making bananas happen in non-banana locations is a very complex process.
Good ideas and organisational ability don't grow on trees.
it's like every "innovation" now brings with it convenience at a higher cost and takes away ownership and often features
personally i'm quite sick of digital nothingness. its all transient.
i want to get more into real world things that have texture, weight and permanence.
https://blog.with.audio/posts/why-everything-doesnt-have-to-...
Yes, things are messed up, FSF is just some fringe radical micro-organisation with no real power, open source movement get EEE'd by the likes of MS, hardware is locked down, your always online games stop working the moment their publishers deem them unprofitable, so what are we doing now?
Lobby politicians to regulate the software and hardware industries.
The solution is quite simple and practical.
* Install Fdroid.
* Do not pay some silly rent for apps.
... but do consider donating to the maintainers/contributors of the libre apps, if you can.
Companies own you - they pay a subscription (your salary) to rent you. Wouldn't it be great if they could pay a one-time fee to own you forever?
They rent my work, not me, and if I am paid for project or contract work, they get to keep what I made after they've stopped paying me.
This dark pattern has completely taken over the iOS ecosystem. Apps hide the fact that they’re paid until you’ve gone through several steps—registration, login, setup—making you believe the what you downloaded it for is just one the next screen. And then, bang, a paywall! with a “generous” 3-day free trial and a $3.99/week subscription.
I uninstall such apps immediately and leave a one-star review. I get it, devs need to make money, but there are better ways than this sleazy bs. Unfortunately, too many gurus have normalized this practice by constantly bragging how much revenue they are making.
Sounds to me like a fallacy; there always were, are and will be are open-source alternatives to many of these tools and services, but they will never reach the scale and user-friendliness of the pay-to-use versions simply because of incentives. It's a painful and arduous work to make something of value to a particular demographic of users and keeping it so - we simply didn't find any better than for-profit companies way of providing such amazing things.
I think it’s going to be AI. you need it running locally. You need to be able to fine tune it for your needs and it needs to prioritize your needs over other considerations.
The most important thing to own is a CPU that isn't vendor-locked.
My naive theory is that the fed targeting N > 0 yearly inflation is _horrendous_ for society. It forces pricing schemes like the article mentions. It encourages cheap, easy money sources which is often at odds with what is best for society. Rent seeking seems to be a hallmark of this system.
On the other end, it gives asset holders a way to grow their share of the pie while doing almost nothing. The more money we print, the less everyone else has (relatively), and the more valuable assets become simply because we printed money - not because any value was created. Our monetary policy is to constantly devalue labor.
To put it succinctly: We’ve made enormous technological strides and people still have to work 8 hours a day and worry if they’ll end up on the streets someday.
Other systems exist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit), yet I see almost 0 mainstream discussion of this issue much less alternatives. My conspiracy theory is of course the billionaires don’t want to change things (they’d likely be reduced to millionaires), so anyone who gets close to talking about this is ignored or canceled.
Imagine if it became cool to have dvd and cd collections again. I feel like gen z could bring this back.
World economic forums talk and 0romotional materials on "the great reset"
50 year mortgages is a way for you to own nothing under the guise of owning.
they have talking about owning nothing for a while at Davos - yet they keep accumulating stuff.
I can live very well with voluntary transactions where I subscribe or not to some product that I’ll never own. But I can’t say no to the state and their eternal threat of violence.
p.S. preemptively, knowing the kind of feedback this content will get: got to love it when Americans give me the “at least you don’t go bankrupt by going to the hospital!”. No, I give the state most my money every time I pay them taxes, so, not a lot of space left to go bankrupt once in the case of a medical emergency. What about letting people choose?
Hello. USian here.
Looking at my taxes from last year, The State took 35% of what I earned.
I'd gladly pay 22% more if I got
* Healthcare that I'm not (or am hardly) billed for using and don't have to pay extra every month for [0]
* Mandatory six weeks minimum paid vacation
* Actual employment contracts that mean my employer can't up and say "Whoopsidoodle, this is your three month notice that we're requiring you to stop working from home and either move across the continent to sit your ass in one of our offices or quit. Severance? What severance?!?"; they actually have to justify upending the lives of their workers
* Governments that diswant to waste enormous amounts of money on pointless decades-long occupations of foreign nations
[0] In my state, bottom-end publicly-available health insurance (where I'm expected to pay ~7,000 USD out of pocket before anything is covered) costs ~500 USD a month and is expected to double in cost soon. [1]
[1] The current cost of the health insurance combined with the deductable raises my effective tax burden to 38%. The expected doubling in monthly cost raises it to 40%. [2]
[2] Yes, one typically gets USian health insurance through one's employer. The big appeal of the European system is that if you're unemployed (whether by choice, injury, or the cumulative injuries of advanced age), you don't have to pay out the ass for basic life-sustaining services. I think wonks call this the "social safety net".
But you are right, I don’t have to pay out the ass for my basic life-sustaining services… what I do have to pay out of the ass, every month, is for someone else’s basic life sustaining services.
Ah.
Well, I've every expectation that you're free to move to some second- or third-tier country that both welcomes newcomers and lets folks fend for themselves, financially. [0] Bon voyage!
[0] I would suggest you move to the US, but we've been (and continue to be) batshit insane about preventing folks from moving in. Sorry!
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Actually, probably not. I don't have a college degree, and have nothing special about my background so the odds that I'd be welcomed in to do programming work without having someone to marry are preeeeeeeeety low. (Source: I have US expat family who became foreign citizens and described the process to me.)
Come and help us feed the great wealth redistribution monster. We need more people that actually work to keep supporting the ever increasing numbers of those that don’t want to.
If you listen to the propaganda, the same is true about the US. And yet, big US tech companies are constantly screaming for more Skilled Worker visa allotments. Odd.
> I’m sure an American with an IT background (degree or no degree) would not be sent away.
I'll trust the report of family who has actually been through the process over the word of someone who's figuratively hopping mad about contributing to a decent social safety net, but lacks the stones required to move off to a second- or third-rate country that has a taxation policy more to their liking, thanx. ;)
I'm sure that's your real reason for you not to follow your own advice. Advice that you feel the need to give other people when they don't want to indulge in your socialist fantasies...
I'll assume you meant "immigration". The US's emigration laws would apply to me.
If I wasn't a US citizen, and my goal wasn't to gain official, above-board citizenship in an EU-member nation by way of doing work as a programmer, system administrator, or other such similar job, then I imagine I would have an easier time getting in, yes. For example, if my place of residence was in a low-cost-of-living country and my intent was to take whatever odd jobs I could get and use the excess to establish a nice nest egg back home, I imagine I'd have a much easier -if far more precarious- time.
Anyway, make sure to keep your grinding wheel well maintained; you seem to make frequent use of it.
Interesting, it's almost like you are telling us you have it better there in the USA. Hypocrisy at its best...
Writing from a third-tier country that welcomes nationalizations, confiscations, extortions, and all the other policies you'd approve of.
2) Other than open borders and purchasing civilization for all residents by way of taxation, I absolutely do not approve of the policies you mention, or -given the rest of your comment- the ones you might imagine that I do.
That’s why we built ChannelVault (https://mestr.io/channelvault.html), as a desktop app (made with Wails + Go) to archive and search Slack workspaces locally for eDiscovery and backups. No SaaS, no recurring fees, no cloud dependency. It just runs on your computer and keeps your data with you. Trying to defy that general trend.
I miss when software felt like something you actually owned, not rented month to month.
FOSS covers most of my needs and when it doesn't, I just hack something together. Even as a humanities sort and inept programmer, I can generally manage something which will meet my needs and not only do I own it, I made it. Having this sort of mentality has an interesting side effect, most of what can be bought is always less than and not only because it not something I made but because what can be bought is never quit right for my needs. So the compromise of FOSS becomes less of an issue (even with GIMP) and in those times when it becomes an issue, I make do by hacking up a FOSS offering or building from the ground up.
Admittedly, working around the seg faults that I can't seem to fix is a compromise, but it is a small one and preferable to the alternatives.