> How do you pay developers to continuously fix bugs, provide security updates and update their software when the underlying hardware and operating system changes?
Have we really strayed so far that everyone's forgotten how this is done? Security fixes and serious bug fixes should always be free (At least going back N-1. You price that work into the sale price to begin with), and you get ongoing revenue by selling new versions.
And if the person is happy with the current version “n” that they were using, kept the same operating system while you released n+1 and n+2 to stay compatible with new operating systems then they decided to upgrade their hardware and find out that their old software doesn’t work?
They will still need to buy a new version or should that be free?
If the author of BBEdit never added a feature since 1991. You would have still had to pay for new versions to run on your PPC/Classic MacOS, OS X PPC, x86 Mac and now your ARM Mac.
Back in the “good old days” MS Office cost $595 for each version if you had a Mac and Windows PC.
Now it’s $99/year for five users and you can run on your Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, web, or Android device.
The same for Photoshop.
And you get continuous features added as the platform vendor and software vendor add more capabilities.
> and you get ongoing revenue by selling new versions
This works exactly up until the moment that your software is good enough that most of your userbase stops paying to upgrade. Then you are dead in the water, and the software becomes abandonned by design.
Obviously that's bad for businesses - but it's great for consumers! I think the question that's being asked is if there's some business model out there that delivers what customers want (the ability to just buy a finished product once and have it work decades down the line, like "pass it down to your kids" long) while also delivering profits to shareholders.
There's a reason farmers want the ability to repair their own tractors without having to give John Deere an extra cut, you know.
> if there's some business model out there that delivers what customers want ... while also delivering profits to shareholders.
Of course there is, but that's why software in a box cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per version, with minimal bug or security updates thereafter. The grass is always greener, yeah it's a pain in the ass having a ton of $10/mo subscriptions. But I'd much rather have that - as both a consumer and a developer - than have $800 single-sale purchases.
You emulate the abandonware, old OS and all. She kicked the habit recently, but my sister preferred Word 5.1 for Mac for a long time. That was a 68k program, which she dutifully used _on a PC_ while Apple was busy shipping iOS on ARM and Mac OS on x86. The Centris 610 is very tired, but the software still works. (Well, not the original copy. Those install floppies are very dead.) Software can be uniquely persistent, in a way physical artifacts can't, so why are we so insistent on keeping everyone on the upgrade treadmill?
George R.R. Martin pretty famously uses WordStar on DOS. I can't imagine it'd be some win for consumers (either Martin personally, or downstream enjoyers of his books) if he had to be on the latest internet-connected, ad-infested, notification-riddled copy of Windows just so that his OS and Office Suite could repeatedly check to make sure he still has an active subscription and a valid "digital entitlement."
I still use Office 2010. (Though it gets increasingly difficult to activate it, and it last received security updates in 2020.) In 2010 I was using x86_64 (an Athlon 64 X2), and today I'm using x86_64. Why should I upgrade? It happens to still run on Windows 11, but I'd gladly stuff it in a VM to continue using it. (I do use Office <current 365 build> for work, so I can pretty confidently say there is nothing worth paying for in there. The only feature even remotely interesting is PowerQuery for Excel, which is available as an add-in for Office 2010.)
Well, my wife uses one my 5 user Office 365 subscription licenses on her Mac. I use it on my iPad and phone. My mom uses it on her Windows laptop and her iPad.
We each get 1TB of online storage.
Compare that to the $599 that Office for Mac use to cost and that you could only use on one computer.
Have we really strayed so far that everyone's forgotten how this is done? Security fixes and serious bug fixes should always be free (At least going back N-1. You price that work into the sale price to begin with), and you get ongoing revenue by selling new versions.