Hacker News Reader

Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

This is the problem with subscription based software. In the days when people owned the software they used, a price increase like this would simply not be possible. People would be able to upgrade their own software on their own timeline.

Since Windows, despite its many faults, has a rock solid ABI (application binary interface), that piece of proprietary software from 2006 I use today still runs fine, as does that open source game from 2005 which I don’t need to figure out how to recompile.

So, yes, if these companies were able to buy the software instead of renting a SAAS (software as a service), they wouldn’t be subject to a huge bill to continue using what they have been using. And they would be able to still use that software for the foreseeable future.

View on HN

This argument is unfortunately flawed. If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js (the old one having been deprecated and also full of security bugs). They'd have to find somewhere to run it and pay someone to keep an eye on that deployment for when it does something weird that affects service. Oh and they'd have to maintain mobile apps on Android and iOS as those platforms change and break things. They might need to buy cyber risk insurance too.

AI tools do show promise of being able to handle all these things in the future, but at least for the past few years these customers had an incredible bargain vs what it would have cost them to run and maintain the application even if they had the source code for free.

If they had used a desktop Win32 binary as you suggested, that would also have needed security updates, and it wouldn't have worked on phones or macbooks, and it would have needed a back end service (see above).

> If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js (the old one having been deprecated and also full of security bugs).

We don't have to make everything a javascript app running on the open internet. Though even an insecure node server could be perfectly fine if deployed on the corpnet behind a VPN...

Thats a very spicy threat model post the age of IoT.

Any stray device you may not even be aware of can rip that assurance apart.

A fully locked down network can in theory enable this however, very few enterprises actually are strict enough for this to be enforced across the whole network.

> day 100 it would be full of security bugs, would need to be re-written for the new version of Node.js

I do not believe this is the case at all. If I'm running software locally that works on local files that I control then there is no security issue. Even if there are bugs that can be exploited, they won't be exploited because I'm in control of the data.

This whole mess is a non-issue and is only there as an excuse to push this horrible web SaaS subscription nonsense that we have. It's nothing but a stupid excuse to justify daily software updates so that companies and inject ads and remove features to push subscriptions.

Even shrinkwrapped software is subscription-based. It's just whether the subscription is monthly or every 5 years.

> This argument is unfortunately flawed. If the customers had been handed the software on day 1, by day 100 it would be full of security bugs

Stop. This doesn't have to be true...

> Oh and they'd have to maintain mobile apps on Android and iOS as those platforms change and break things. They might need to buy cyber risk insurance too.

This worked just fine, also, until Apple decided to have meetings with devs of popular software to push for subscriptions. Not we have the current state of bullshit.

You obviously have full trust of Google and Microsoft accounts. You should take a visit or research of dark web. So many never ever get reported to haveibeenpwned.com. And if you are lucky to know some white hacks, they will be laughing at the idea of subscription software more secure. I worked in these kind of industry. Sometime we just swapped out libraries with zero bug fixes or even introduced obvious faults to justify updates. And many time we purposely blocked updates so can justify "upgrades", which is like subscriptions on top of subscriptions with maybe some kind of microtransactions disguised as optional addons. They are full of security exploits. We hope they are discovered to allow another round of updates and upgrades.

The majority of businesses still use buy-once invoicing software. Which they of course should. Paying a subscription for such a thing isn't very smart.

Industry? Source? This does not match my experience to date. I see subscriptions everywhere from telephony, CMS, slack, quip, etc.

Note the word "invoicing" there in my comment.

> The majority of businesses still use buy-once invoicing software.

are you sure about that? Most small biz I know use Quickbooks for that, and it's a subscription service.

QB desktop will nag you to death to get the latest but it is still a pay once arrangement.

BTW QB desktop has also been seriously enshittified.

FWIW in the UK I rather imagine many small businesses (Harvest's target) are getting their invoicing from Freeagent.

Most that I know use Excel ... which is a SaaS now I guess. So then I stand corrected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com