General > General Technical Chat
$20,000 dollars of software or licences on a thumbdrive ?
tooki:
--- Quote from: shapirus on April 26, 2024, 05:48:51 pm ---Well that was somewhat of an overstatement, of course, for the most part as a reaction to certain ridiculous licensing practices. Some commercial licenses may be okay(ish).
--- End quote ---
Well I will be the first to agree that many, many software companies have become greedy and unreasonable in their licensing.
I’m not even categorically opposed to subscription models (insofar as, having worked in the software industry years ago, I really do understand why subscriptions have some major advantages for both publisher and consumer*), but I think the pricing needs to be reasonable, and license management/activation reliable and measured. I still prefer perpetual licensing, though, and I think that as societies, we need to consider passing laws that require companies to ensure users retain access to their data even if the company decides to discontinue a product (and ends subscriptions for it) or if the company goes out of business. If that means that companies are forced to permanently unlock the software, or even release source code, I’m OK with that.
*Most of my work at the software company was doing user support, and it was a CONSTANT source of frustration that some customers wouldn’t update to the current version (even ones who used it under a site license, and thus had unrestricted access to all updates). They’d call or write with some bug or feature request, and it’d be some bug that had been fixed ages ago or feature that had already been added. And no, we’re not gonna invest the time to make sure our current software runs on your operating system that the OS vendor stopped updating 10 years ago. (And similarly, stop trying to run a 10 year old version of the software on today’s OS.)
strawberry:
expected 3y lifetime and 1/5000 failure rate for consumer grade products
well invested 20000EUR
Siwastaja:
The story is obviously made-up. Obviously when you buy expensive software, you register your order with the publisher and if you lose your copy, any company would give you a new copy. It's not like you'd anonymously buy a license for a multi-thousand $ software.
Infraviolet:
"Thumbdrives, especially modern ones, are 99% crap"
And I swear they get worse year by year, I've USB sticks from the 2010s still perfectly working despite enough gigabytes copied on/deleted/replaced to cover the capacity several times, versus drives from the last few years which die before they're even full once.
tooki:
I only buy top-quality thumb drives (Lexar, Sandisk, Samsung) and consequently have never had one fail, whether it was from 2004 or 2020.
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