- if it's free software you use locally (or SaaS you know you can self host), you should be able to keep using it even if the business model changes (which can happen in the proprietary world, see Adobe for a spectacular example). If the software is popular enough, there's some chance the thing will be forked and maintained by somebody else. Of course, no guarantees on this. I strongly prefer local software for this reason.
- you should definitely look at the business model of whoever builds your software. If it burns investor money or runs on ads, it's not good, for the reasons you mentioned.
- paid software is not a guarantee against your concerns. I already mentioned Adobe, windows is also full of ads and spying nowadays. VMWare and Confluence also have fucked their customers quite hard on pricing recently. Actually, I quite strongly distrust proprietary software seeing how common these things seem to happen in the proprietary world and there's no "someone is going to fork it" backup plan.
MacOS isn't without issues neither. It forces you to login for software upgrades and to access the app store (that's tracking in my book), and it's game over when Apple stops supporting your hardware. Its proprietary nature pretty much guarantees nobody will take over. Perfectly good hardware becomes insecure or waste unless its owner decides to replace the OS with Linux. Which isn't possible on iPads and iPhone.
On my end, I haven't had bad surprises so far. Ubuntu has been a bit worrying but I've been using something else for years now. The biggest concern for me today is Firefox. The strictly open source nature of the repositories from which I install Firefox is a first "safeguard".
My software is largely sponsored by companies selling support, they have an incentive to make sure it keeps working. It is so good that I can install the latests versions on 15-20 year old hardware.
- if it's free software you use locally (or SaaS you know you can self host), you should be able to keep using it even if the business model changes (which can happen in the proprietary world, see Adobe for a spectacular example). If the software is popular enough, there's some chance the thing will be forked and maintained by somebody else. Of course, no guarantees on this. I strongly prefer local software for this reason.
- you should definitely look at the business model of whoever builds your software. If it burns investor money or runs on ads, it's not good, for the reasons you mentioned.
- paid software is not a guarantee against your concerns. I already mentioned Adobe, windows is also full of ads and spying nowadays. VMWare and Confluence also have fucked their customers quite hard on pricing recently. Actually, I quite strongly distrust proprietary software seeing how common these things seem to happen in the proprietary world and there's no "someone is going to fork it" backup plan.
MacOS isn't without issues neither. It forces you to login for software upgrades and to access the app store (that's tracking in my book), and it's game over when Apple stops supporting your hardware. Its proprietary nature pretty much guarantees nobody will take over. Perfectly good hardware becomes insecure or waste unless its owner decides to replace the OS with Linux. Which isn't possible on iPads and iPhone.
On my end, I haven't had bad surprises so far. Ubuntu has been a bit worrying but I've been using something else for years now. The biggest concern for me today is Firefox. The strictly open source nature of the repositories from which I install Firefox is a first "safeguard".
My software is largely sponsored by companies selling support, they have an incentive to make sure it keeps working. It is so good that I can install the latests versions on 15-20 year old hardware.