Many of those would be broken in various ways if they were not updated. For starters: VLC due to missing codecs, firefox not supporting newer standards. All the software you mentioned was most likely heavily updated since your teens.

VLC got popular because it was the first media player that would always play whatever you threw at it. But thinking back to those times, perhaps there was merit in those older players which stayed the same, but made you occasionally install a codec pack. It was a sensible separation between the "chrome" that was stable in time, and the decoders which were changing often to accommodate new and better formats.

It's not necessarily a generational thing. I grew up on DOS before Windows was common, remember v1 of OpenOffice and Phoenix and the birth of CSS and JS, and have been making webpages since before the div tag was invented. I bought and used many tools like Notepad++ and Ultraedit and Sublime, and used the heck out of Paint Shop Pro and some GIMP and the rest.

But many of those tools are quite a bit less powerful than the commercial subscription ones. Creative Cloud CC is very powerful when you use it professionally, as is IntelliJ. Worth it to me because I know the difference, having used both kinds of tools and payment models for more than 20 years. These days I make a little more money than I did back in the 90s, so I don't pirate or demand freeware and would rather pay for something sustainable and have it work well because my time is worth it.

Take IntelliJ for example. There was a big uproar when they moved to a subscription model, but their products have continued to get better since. The company would've gone bankrupt otherwise. Instead, their pricing is now both very fair and includes a perpetual fallback license, while their software still keeps improving. I am happy to pay for it because it adds tremendous value over VSCode or Notepad++ in my workflows.

Of course some FOSS software is still amazing. VLC is still the best player I know of. Audacity is still useful and I find myself using that more than Audition.

But other times the subscriptions just deliver better software that I'm happy to pay for.

>"Take IntelliJ for example. There was a big uproar when they moved to a subscription model"

They did not move. They still offer perpetual license. Otherwise I would not be using their products.

It's both isn't it? Subscription plus perpetual fallback?

yup. best of both worlds.

I actually do the same in with one of my products.

I don't where/when/how this myth started. If anyone from JetBrains is reading this, please asking you sales/PR/marketing team to make it crystal clear on your website so that we can kill off this silly myth that hurts your excellent brand.

>"...sales/PR/marketing team to make it crystal clear on your website"

They have, just not what you think unless your post is an attempt at humor:

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...