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Comment by uhx | Hacker News Reader

Subscriptions are fine, companies are greedy

I’m absolutely not fine with being a subscriber. Whenever there’s a lifetime license alternative, that goes to the top of my list. I’m not into being somebody’s peon who has to keep paying an unknown fraction of their income to maintain functionality I would’ve broken even on years ago.

Its not a black and white situation for me

Security software? Hosting my data? Sure, I understand there are ongoing costs to provide the service.

One-time licenses tells me the maintainers will not be incentivized to keep my lights on forever. Service will suffer eventually.

See Plex. I paid once a decade ago and it’s not even the same thing anymore. They push live TV, always online features, etc

I still run Excel 2007 because as long as it can read and write .xlsx files that my Mathematica models can ingest and output I’m good with that. Every version of Mathematica has a perennial license, even if a new version comes out every year. I want the cloud service? That’s a monthly extra, and I’m cool with that. Office 365, where they randomly decide to shove Copilot down my throat and I lose all ability to edit documents I created if I don’t pay the monthly tithe? No, I’m not cool with that.

Yeah, I’m old enough to remember buying boxed software. It was a veritable product in every sense.

Your o365 example just shows that even with stodgy old office suite software, we pay rent to be the product. Copilot has to be added everywhere so a VP will get a promotion showing how many new users they have (for features nobody wants but are forced into paying for)

So… we should just pony up the monthly or yearly fee and let that VP get his promotion because he extorted hundreds of millions in exchange for something about we desirable we Clippy and with the mental capacity of Bob?

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