I'm not sure where you get this idea that you're somehow entitled to be able to purchase software instead of renting it.
I get that idea from the standard of licensing for small utility software, and I reject the imposition of new terms. I don't feel 'entitled' to anything, and your choice of words is designed only to incite an emotional response rather than furthering logical discourse.
There's a word for that, you know.
You mention Adobe CC. I pay their monthly fee for my business.
As do I. Because it's a business expense, because the products are tremendously powerful, and receive continuous upgrades at the hands of a relatively massive team of developers, because they offer cloud storage and integration within their massive suite of applications, because they demand a premium for being at the forefront of usability and featureset, and because I need them to get the job done.
In fact,
that's the exact point I was making above.
[We also pay for] other software products. Some have continual updates, some don't. It's just the new business model—
Nope. It's not
the new business model, it's
a new business model, and it's one that we reject for small utility applications that don't provide continual updates or rely on a backend service.
Listen, I'm not going to make absolute statements that hard-challenge you on anything related to the airlines or unions or anything in that subject area—even if I privately suspect that you may be absolutely wrong, I'll hold my tongue as I know that I know less about those specific areas than you—but here you're on my turf.
and frankly, it doesn't bother me one bit. I get to pay in smaller amounts instead of paying everything up front and having to worry about buying updates, and they get an enhanced revenue stream over the long term. Win/win.
If LogTen had a track record of delivering meaningful improvements with each update, and if the software had continued to expand its aegis to do amazing things, then I think there wouldn't be nearly as much pushback.
What
you do is not indicative of the overall market, and I'm sure you're well aware of that. As you say above, your
business subscribes to quite a few pieces of software. My
business does, too.
Personally, I subscribe to two online games, both of which receive extensive continuous development and store massive amounts of data on the backend (Eve Online and another), but I don't subscribe to a web browser, an AIM client, skype, Scrivener, my ssh client, my calculator, my spreadsheet software, Logic, my $10000 of Waves/UAD plugins, Ableton, my modeling software, my operating system software, or ANYTHING ELSE. I pay a nominal fee for additional iCloud storage, and I have in the past paid a nominal fee for dropbox... in both cases paying for storage that is run somewhere else by someone else to extremely high availability standards.
I and others reject the concept of a revolving license for a piece of utility software for which the money I pay represents a fee solely towards ongoing development/profit if that ongoing development isn't substantial. And frankly, while a good piece of software at its core, LogTen doesn't have a track record of exponential improvement such that I would expect to recoup my license fee in functionality.
-Fox