Re:When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
by ohgodplsno on Saturday May 06, 2023 @02:50PM
(#35844228)
>You have a "fully up to date" product until an operating system upgrade breaks it
The amount of Windows executables that cannot work after upgrades is absurdly low, and is often obscure software that either relies on internal behavior or simply hasn't been tested and approved on newer versions by The Powers That Be. MacOS tends to be dreadful on backwards compatibility, but that's more due to Apple's clown-ish behavior when it comes to backwards compat. As for linux, well, welcome to LTS life.
> there's a security vulnerability that really does need to be patched.
So, for an extremely small minority of programs, it's a problem. Unless there's an RCE in FL Studio, you won't ever need to upgrade it. And unless FL Studio takes in unsanitized output from the outside... yeah, no, not a problem.
Although I sold a small-time file manager shareware product for a number of years, I tend to agree that forever upgrades isn't a great model in general. Especially if sales are trailing off over time, I have zero incentive to provide updates/patches especially if some major change is needed. In my case, I decided that a significant upgrade would require major changes and it wasn't worth the effort. Not sure it would have been even with an upgrade fee but certainly wasn't absent one.