What's wrong is periodically pulling the rug out from under customers
to force them to "upgrade". You know, in most states in the US, it's
a crime that results in prison time for an auto mechanic to tell a
customer that s/he needs a "repair" that s/he doesn't really need, or
to deliberately break something in order to charge a fee to fix it.
But software vendors get away with this kind of crap all the
time--more or less in collusion with hardware vendors. IMO, it's a
moral crime, even if it isn't (yet) a statutory one.
Hi Ken!
How does this morally differ from time-bombing an application? That is,
if it differs, it might not.
I have no problems with time-bombs in demos or shareware.
I have no problem with the idea of software that requires periodic paid
updates in order to deal with changes in the problem domain--for example,
income tax software that needs updates to address changes in the tax code
from year to year.
I don't really have a problem with the idea of charging for legitimate
ongoing support for software--as long as the vendor doesn't have the
temerity to demand that I pay them to fix bugs that they create, or to
demand that I pay them to find out something about the software that should
have been in the documentation that came with it. Support that falls into
the category of training or coaching is fine--though I've almost never used
such a thing. In my personal experience such support is about as worth
paying for as a service contract on a VCR--but YMMV.
I do have a problem with the "public utility" model of subscription
software that simply stops working if the user stops paying. Fortunately,
at least for now, this practice is limited to specialty applications.
Fortunately, also, I already have several working computers loaded with
working OSes and working software that does everything I need--and after a
point, the older an OS gets, the less malware there is floating around that
will bother to attack it. If the software world went whole-hog for that
model, I'd never buy another piece of software, and I'd encourage others to
boycott the industry.
In that scenario, when the hardware dies and I can no longer buy new
equipment that will work with my old software, I could manage the move to
Linux and free/open-source applications (though right off the bat my
satellite internet access would be gone--simply won't run on anything other
than Windows---and that would be a big sacrifice because I live way out in
the boonies). However, I do not underestimate the difficulty or expense of
getting the average user in my organization to do the same.
Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org
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