Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.
Man I think you're spot-on. Back in the day the biggest motivator companies had to make good products was that they would be competing in the market with their own old products.
If you have a product and a team working on it, it’s tempting to just keep adding things to the product. You can’t just sit around fixing bugs, they say. When that is precisely what customers would want. Can’t make upsells though and when you’re a business that kind of thing really matters… nobody from within can see that the ship is so heavy it can’t stay afloat anymore. Until it’s sunk.
The video game industry is plagued by this problem. With live-service games becoming commonplace, there has also been a recent trend of games being released in an incomplete state. The shocking part is that multi-million dollar "AAA" game studios are engaging in this behavior. There's also a strong "own nothing" component to the issue.
I'm sorry to write that all those were problems before subscriptions too.
Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.
The ayes have it. Motion passed, now let's discuss the subscription tiers. How many stickers should we include with the premium 'founders' subscription tier?
I continue to maintain that the problem here is not greed but laziness. Make money with less effort or make even more money over a longer term with more effort. Building for the future requires effort and investment and has the potential to make more money than focusing purely on the current quarter.
Subscriptions can create an illusion of a deal, because in principle, you’re ostensibly able to benefit more for a fixed price. But are you?
Netflix is a good example. You can watch as much as you want for a flat rate, but how many people watch enough to justify the monthly fee? (Putting aside the question of whether watching so much is actually a benefit in the first place.) Companies recognize the distinction between potential use and actual use, and so in practice, many are paying more for less and subsidizing the outliers that consume more. When actual use exceeds predicted use, the company will raise the price of subscription.
Subscriptions make sense for situations where there are regular maintenance costs or where the benefits are received at a steady and proportional rate.
>I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? [...] It's actually more convenient than streaming services.
I think your technical sophistication means you're somewhat out-of-touch with what "most" people do.
Most normal people watch Netflix/HBO/etc on smartphones/tablets, or stream devices like Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast puck, Apple TV cube, or the "smart tv app" built-in with their Samsung or LG tv. All of those "mainstream devices used by most" don't make it easy to access torrenting sites or files. Sure, one could hypothetically sideload a torrenting app on a Google Chromecast but now you're beyond the demographic of "most people" because you have extra complexity of also adding some USB storage to save the torrent or point to a local network share.
The type of situations that makes "torrenting more convenient" are people watching everything on a laptop or have a dedicated HTPC media server hooked up to their tv.
I'm technically savvy and it was not easy to sideload Kodi player onto Amazon Fire Stick to legitimately play DVD ISOs. It required a lot of google searches to finally figure it out. (E.g. after realizing VLC app for Fire Stick doesn't work, and then finally stumbling across a "developer setting", and then getting the SMB network path correct, and so on...) Thinking that most people could just torrent is being unrealistic.
Torrents nowadays have <1% the number of people they had a decade ago. It didn't used to be considered technically sophisticated, just a new version of file sharing that everyone used two decades ago.
Updates were fewer and far between back then, but they were bigger updates with more features. Now, many subscription services seem content to milk fewer feature upgrades staggered over years.
> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves.
Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors.
Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.
Affinity did have a growing userbase, partly because you could just buy the app for $50 and use it perpetually.
I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".
>Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.
Graphic designer here. Adobe’s products are the golden standard in the industry and are often the only products used by entire graphic teams, being the odd one out using Affinity’s or (heaven forbid) Corel’s tools makes collaboration difficult (if not entirely impossible) due to how unfriendly and unpredictable portability between apps can be, and unpredictable is the last thing you want in an environment where precision is absolutely essencial.
It’s sad, really. Adobe’s apps are powerful, yes, but they’re stuck in time. They perform horrendously and have terrible UI/X that aren’t even standardised between apps (even something as simple as the icon for their own assets library cloud is not the same between apps).
How I wish someone would come along and eat Adobe’s lunch to force it to pull itself together for once, but alas, that’s unlikely at best.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore."
That's your decision. I've published an music album on Bandcamp. You can buy it, I'll send you a real physical tape and you can _download_ high quality FLAC you own then.
If you like to own things, you have all the possibilities.
But I agree, we maybe tend to forget about high quality stuff, if we consume conveniently low quality streaming content for example on Spotify.
It’s a descision everyone makes, in almost all cases (okay, maybe only in few mobile app cases) "ownable" alternatives exist.
> You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore
This is the more general statement, once again, alternatives exist. I own almost all my apps and tools, and 100% of my music. Either because they are free, or because I bought them. Sometimes I’d would be easier to go the other way, but it’s still (mostly) a choice.
If I have FLAC or mp3 files, they cannot become a subscription.
If I have a working binary that does not need internet, it cannot become a subscription.
If I have invested in making open source solutions work, then I can also figure out ways to continue to own my tools, even if the company goes the subscription way.
Yes, you can snapshot your entire life and try to have it be isolated from online. I know because I do this all the time, but the reality is the world moves forward, and the point of the post is that the trend is towards these customer hostile patterns and away from ownership. As someone focused on digital sovereignty, I very much notice this trend, so I think the point is valid.
Oh for sure. I struggle with keeping my offline workable music collection up to date vs just using spotify. But the pain point of not having music with no internet (the laughable limited option of spotify "download" does not count) is strong enough for me to do it regulary.
(Also I like working offline when I can. Less distractions.)
The point of the article is that Goodnotes stopped selling a lifetime purchase version of the app and a lot of other products go this route. You can't buy things that can't be bought.
It does mention music in the quoted part though. And even regarding goodnotes, it’s a choice to use a tool like that. There are *many* note taking apps.
Not just apps but methods, too. And they're all fishing in the same pool, and they're all trying to sell the same product (a subscription), and they're all trying real hard to integrate AI, after making extra money from selling your notes (or a distillation or statistical analysis thereof).
No, I don't have all the possibilities. I can own movies in physical form, but I can't own the movies I want to own. And it can be even worse. Here I can watch Disney/Pixar movies wonderfully dubbed into local language in cinemas with my grandchildren, but even Disney+ subscription doesn't have these audio tracks.
This is why I collect vinyl records, make my own cassette tapes and have a fairly huge DAS drive with all my media (movies, music, photos, etc). Ironically, I use Plex (non free), but I can pivot very easily if needed.
But even buying your album comes with limitations.
I can not copy and redestribute copies. I can not play it in public spaces for an audience with further ado, etc.
The concept of owning is, rightfully, changing. We are a lot of people who use this planet, and the purist view of ownership simply does not make sense.
You can not own a part of a river to dump chemicals, just for thst to flow to the next owner down stream.
> can not play it in public spaces for an audience with further ado, etc.
Ah that can of worms. When i would play music out loud in the office, the company has to pay a fee to the copyright reimbursement foundation and a fee to the same system representing the artists (actually the studios, but semantics). And that would be for every employee no matter who heard it and if it was audible in public spaces they count for the max allowable. And that comes on top of the fee I'm already paying (double tax, yay). There is a reason most companies pretend they don't know about this system or ask you to use your own devices and headphones.
Example: in Australia there is an organisation named APRA AMCOS. A friend had a job with them, his job was to visit businesses, see if they were playing music, take evidence of such, and then that business would receive an invoice for the right to play the music.
There were many employees of APRA doing this, in every state, and many cease+desist/lawsuits.
The case was clear cut - you play the music, you paid a fee.
I have zero qualms within myself copying, saving backups, and playing media anywhere and to anyone. I treat lots of ridiculous laws as other people's opinions, and I believe millions of people do the same, and none of us ever get "caught".
> The concept of owning is, rightfully, changing. We are a lot of people who use this planet, and the purist view of ownership simply does not make sense.
This is a bizarre statement. On the one hand, property rights are considered a fundamental human right, and for good reason. And on the other, digital goods don't take up space - no matter how many copies exist. What bearing does the number of people on the planet have in light of this?
All I see is excuses for exploitation by our corporate overlords.
So, no path to one-time pay for a cumulative upgrade? And, if you stop paying after you "upgraded" the license, you lose access to the thing you bought?
I have seen it done in the past, in a limited way.
You would buy a product, and it would give you access to the thing you purchased at that version number plus a number of versions afterwards. Pass that point, you needed to buy it again. I think it is a good compromise between "I own the thing I paid" and "I have to give lifetime support for people who purchase an item once many years ago"
Personally, being somewhat technically inclined I find there is rarely much of a reason to pay for the ongoing use of software. The large majority of software I use is open source and self-hostable. The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them, if programming was my livelihood (and I didn't have an employer to pay for them). But programming is just a hobby for me so I'm not inclined to pay for an IDE. Really the only class of software I occasionally pay for is games, but that is always a once-off payment, I don't subscribe for anything.
When I pay for subscriptions, it tends to be for ongoing access to content (music, movies, etc) or infrastructure (storage, server usage, etc). Often that stuff comes bundled with proprietary software but if anything I would much rather it didn't and I could just interact with the content/infrastructure using open source software.
I'm not generally thrilled to be paying a subscription for content, which I would rather own, and indeed I am getting more and more into taking ownership over it. But admittedly there are other benefits to things like music subscriptions, like discoverability and the fact that you don't need a load of storage.
Note taking apps are something I see discussed a lot on HN and there seem to be loads of fancy subscription based services in that space. I don't get it at all - I use Joplin to keep notes and already I feel like that is an over-engineered solution and am considering just going back to text editor + .txt/.md files.
I understand this is tangential to your point, but..
> The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them
They are also not subscription-based. You get to keep what you pay for. You have a perpetual license to use it. We can quibble over licenses, but in effect, you keep what you bought forever.
Yes, if you want upgrades, you then need to pay for that, and that's where it starts to resemble a subscription. But, it's literally a "You keep what you bought" model. They let you use a years worth of upgrades and then you can decide if you want to pay to keep those upgrades. Which, frankly, is incredibly fair in my book.
Again, I realize this is not the point of your comment, but your Jetbrains remark spawned this line of thinking related to the context of subscription based software.
They get lost. They aren't backed up. You can't search them. They run out of pages precisely when you forget to bring another one. You can't reorder pages. There's no easy way to keep professional and personal notes separate without carrying two notebooks, or keep them separated and organized by subject without carrying even more of them. Etc etc.
> You can't reorder pages. [...] or keep them separated and organized by subject without carrying even more of them.
It's instructive to think on how this was done in the pre-computer era. We used ring binders, which allow one to easily re-order pages, and group them by subject.
> They run out of pages precisely when you forget to bring another one.
The tablet equivalent is running out of battery when you need it the most.
I've never in my life seen anyone take notes on loose leaf sheets in a ring binder -- not now, and not when I was in school in the pre-computer era. They're not very ergonomic and the holes rip easily on thin note paper. There's a reason everyone always uses spiral-bound or glue-bound. So maybe not as instructive as you think.
And if you use your tablet regularly, you tend to recharge it every night, and they tend to last all day long. I literally can't remember the last time my tablet ran out of battery. They're not like phones in that way.
my daughter uses her ipad for school while I used a paper notebook. She gets way better grades than I ever did. Could she do as well with paper and a pen? maybe - probably? but I've got no leverage...
It's asymmetrical, you publish something online, immediately it is used by social networks or AIs for profit. Vice versa you get an app, it's not even yours.
I think we should strive to avoid playing this game..
But in the end i feel in this particular case, it’s ops fault. He can avoid using that app there’s a world of alternatives for writing apps and organizing apps.
The irony is that a lot / most / all? of these apps and services are built and run on open source software.
(is fully closed source software development even still a thing? is there any popular propriatary programming language / editor / runtime / ecosystem?)
Non-copyleft free software licenses such as the MIT license explicitly grant anyone the right to use the software for any purpose, including for things the original author doesn't approve of, and including building closed-sources apps and services. This is the point of open-source - the original author contributes their software to the open-source commons and then doesn't track who uses it for what. Recent attempts to create licenses that do impose restrictions on Software Freedom 0 are attempts to do ideological advocacy for various leftist causes by means of software licenses, and are not free.
Copyleft free software licenses such as the GPL explicitly grant anyone the right to use the software for any purpose, as long as they also extend this right to their own software. The intent of this license was to infect any novel software built upon GPL-licensed software, forcing it to become free as well; in practice any organization who wants to build a proprietary app or service simply avoids GPL dependencies (or blatantly violates the license terms). Empirically, software companies care more about avoiding being forced to release the source code of their own proprietary software more than they care about using the exclusively-GPL'd software commons as a dependency, and this isn't a problem the license itself can solve.
Funny how I've seen it twice now that when asked what license a published software would adhere to was GPL, but only for non commercial and "you should contact us for commercial use". So you have both he GPL poison pill and non conformity in one package!
I think that's a good option. You get all the benefits of open source as long as you pay it forward. And if you don't want to pay it forward to your users, then I'm not paying it forward to you. This is reciprocal altruism.
These aren't related items so there's no comparison.
Let's say you publish a blog post guide on how to set up a MySql cluster and I use that as part of DevOps contract work for a company. Do I owe you money?
What if I form an opinion because of a political piece you published then produce my own blog post?
AI use of public data to produce new information is exactly what we do as people.
And it's forbidden to do that in certain contexts. Selling a service that regurgitate licensed content is neither legal for humans or machines. German court just reminded OpenAI:
The minute it becomes feasible for the RIAA to charge you a fee every time you have a song playing in your head you can bet they'll be sending you a bill or a legal threat. They'll even come after you for singing when it's profitable enough.
Copyright and performance rights are two separate things. It's completely fine for me to go and perform (not record - that does need a license) the latest hit song until my heart is content.
> It's completely fine for me to go and perform (not record - that does need a license) the latest hit song until my heart is content.
Only in private. Copyright law can give the owner exclusive rights to perform a song publicly. If the lawyers can convince a judge that your singing counts as a public performance you can end up on the hook for not getting or being covered under a performance license.
I think your copyright argument is focused on media, like music. This appears be a specific exception that applies to text. Music sampling for example is a direct copy of the recording but quoting text, even though it's a copy, is a new work because although the words are the same it's not the original copied (as in the quote is written or typed by OpenAI).
Do you mean they simply paste information obtained without citation?
Because if you ask for an opinion on a subject it generates new information itself based on the data gathered.
It does sometimes quote sources, which are properly noted and attributed, but how is that wrong? People write books (for money) all the time and reference sources.
I'm not understanding why you think the LLM is different from a person in how it uses information to produce new work.
No I mean we're in the same community, and perhaps next thing I do is I answer a related question on Stack Overflow that you or someone else can use. Everyone wins, including you, because by writing you also get to structure your thoughts better and perhaps discover some new way.
I mean the degree of use or exchange should matter.
I want to be part of a community of people. And for decades, that's what sharing information online one.
A third party coming in and saying "hey, everybody stop talking to each other, just talk to us and we'll intermediate and eventually replace every interaction between you, and charge money for it, and fill it up with advertising and eventual enshittification" is not aligned with my goals there at all.
So the problem is with search engines, not the communities they index.
Parent said:
> A third party coming in and saying "hey, everybody stop talking to each other, just talk to us and we'll intermediate and eventually replace every interaction between you, and charge money for it
which doesn't seem to be the case in forums and message boards.
Just earlier this month I was at a recording studio and no ILok plugin worked because of a connectivity issue god knows where. Plugins that did cost a lot of cash for them and were in the advertisement material of the studio.
Now even hardware things that used to work for decades need apps. Some guitar pedals need apps to operate. The first generation of those has already become paper weight: after Digitech was bought by Samsung, all the app servers died.
Apps that need a server are never for my behalf, they are purely for creating a dependency. The real feature is allowing an actual backup of the data.
Streaming has the even worse issues. It promises to pay creators, but after listening to only two bands in a month, as an experiment, no visible fraction of the $10 didn’t went to neither of those bands. It probably went to some major label, of course.
I am 100% disillusioned on anything touched by tech and see piracy as a way to resist this crap. So far only piracy has been reliable in having things work as they should when they should.
In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.
I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.
And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.
Besides convenience there is politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?
So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).
I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.
I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
I was pulled back into it after a work colleague showed me a Netflix-like website that seems to have all the films ever made. Apparently there's several of those, they're just invisible to Google.
In Germany we can't really torrent from home, so those sites are very widespread. People just watch stuff at work during lunch, after hours when waiting for a colleague to finish, etc...
I'm not gonna pay for Amazon because it's Amazon, or Disney because it's Disney. And I'm about to kill my Netflix, since it's also complains about Apple Private Relay which I'm not gonna turn off as much as I also hate Apple.
Funny enough, even the CTO of a past company I worked was back into piracy, even after his company had a successful exit. People are just tired of those services, period.
We used to own tools that made us productive. Now we rent tools that make someone else profitable. Subscriptions are not about recurring value but recurring billing and at some point every product decision starts bending toward dependence instead of ownership.
For me it's more like "people used to make free tools so that nobody owns them, no everybody complains they don't come for free without effort". Think of gcc, linux, and many others. There was a huge effort invested in them by people that could sell their knowledge and choose to share it.
We can build today complete products with nothing paid on the tools. This was NOT the case 30 years ago.
Back when subscriptions started to be a thing some people (myself included) were cautiously optimistic.
The problem with paid upfront and paid upgrades was that it eventually resulted in bloated programs because the only way to continue having a business was to add features.
Subscriptions, in theory, could leave the focus on user experience and fixing bugs, because in the end the people who are paying are those that like your product as it is now.
Now of course this optimism was misplaced. Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
> Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
Constant internet connection permitted that. Cloud is only a convenience: you don't have to install and update anything locally, it is updated centrally for everyone by knowledgeable admins instead of some users having problems locally and needing support for each upgrade.
I know this from experience, one company has a local desktop version of our product, but they complain that it requires work from administrator, because users can't upgrade their desktop clients automatically, so they want local-hosted webpage version. This is SCADA system for district heating.
Normal internet users don't want to deal with local-hosted own servers, they want to press a button and it should work. Cloud based systems make that a little more possible.
On a technical level yes. But unless you are selling expensive hardware widgets it can be hard to justify constant upkeep cost of servers without a recurring revenue.
That said I too lived through hosting on premises web services that we later pushed to cloud due to the hassle of maintenance. Self hosting is great when you have a dedicated team to keep it running.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You can’t be expected to get a subscription, but you also can’t be expected to charge for an upgrade.
Now, I hate subscriptions as much as the next person, but I can’t leave this blog without feeling that the op is a bit entitled.
For what it matters, my opinion is that GoodNotes is doing everything correctly. If you bought a 5 lifetime, you can still use it. It’s the same app (that’s interesting, there is a toggle to go between 5 and 6) so I’m assuming it’s still getting bug fixes for new os releases and similar. 5 was a free update to 4, and 6 was released in 2023 (!) so that license was good for a while. They offer discounts if you bought 5, so op point of it being cheaper on a subscription might be wrong. And according to their website they still offer lifetime licenses for 6, bar the AI stuff (which is probably an ongoing cost for them? No idea if it’s local or not).
Plenty of scammy apps and it would be nice to go back to owning things, but this is the same experience if not better to when you could buy software on a cd and keep it a couple decades ago.
> but I can’t leave this blog without feeling that the op is a bit entitled
Not a bit. Extremely entitled. The OP even believes that if they bought a permanent license, they should be entitled to upgrades forever. I really wonder what the mental model of business looks like in their head.
Maybe a basic note app does not require an account and subscription. Maybe it does not mandate an entire organization and marketing team to deal with security updates. The economy around marketing these types of basic apps is crazy.
I think the op is likely poorly wording their feeling or perhaps are early in exploring their frustrations. They may sound entitled because of this. Their intuition does ring true however. Its 2025 and we are talking a notes app. Handheld pdas had notes applications in the 80s why on earth would we need a subscription let alone dozens of competing subscriptions to take notes. OP will probably find they can get what they need from copy left software and happily ignore this noise in time.
As someone who has used Goodnotes 5 for years, my experience is that it’s getting new bugs—not new bug fixes. Anecdotal of course, but since Goodnotes 6 released, I’ve started seeing frequent issues with erased text not disappearing and menus behaving poorly. This is on a brand new iPad Air.
I’m slowly going more and more down this route but I’m curious about what you or others are using for banking apps and parking payment apps. I actually want to switch to graphene OS but there are always these rare corner cases.
Today alone I payed something like 20% extra because I didn’t want to download an app to pay for parking (other parking places won’t even accept payment without the app) and I had to download a closed source app to activate a sim card.
Graphene is great but you will face many choices where you will just need to say no to something others consider normal. Or have a second normie phone to use as needed.
I've been working in this direction as well. I treat it like a game. Sure I /could/ just order thing off the internet, but if it were a scavenger hunt, where could I find thing at a locally owned business and pay cash?
Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard, sometimes I give up and order it online. But the more people do this the more it will (continue to) be a supported use-case.
I've had some interesting conversations, interacting with people in the real world, just by going into a store and telling them I'm trying to find a thing. I tell them what game I'm playing, they're usually pleased to hear it and happy to help if they can.
>I’m slowly going more and more down this route but I’m curious about what you or others are using for banking apps and parking payment apps. I actually want to switch to graphene OS but there are always these rare corner cases.
I'm too busy right now, but I think my medium-term plan is to get a local bank and just use them locally like the old days. I'm stuck on iPhone for a variety of reasons, but I'd still like to get my app count down as much as possible. Plus if my phone falls into a river I'll still be able to do my banking. I think the convenience hit will be worth it.
They are slowly removing branches in the UK. Opening hours are only a few hours a week in certain places. You have to use the app to verify online purchases in my case. There is no workaround.
I basically firewall stuff like the bank apps and other stuff on my phone. My PC for the most part is just Debian Linux and my car is an older vehicle that can be literally repaired indefinitely due to it being more utilitarian.
I suggest going to the mobile phone store and asking them to activate it. There is almost always a way. Bring a decoy dumbphone if you want. And if they say no, try another store until they say yes or refund you.
No luck needed. It was a series of intentional choices anyone could make if they wished.
I co-run two tech companies in silicon valley, maintain several online communities, organize events, have an active social life, travel a lot, have many tech hobbies, go to shows and events, etc.
I am hardly the amish person people tend to imagine.
FOSS software can work for virtually anyone in the modern world that wants freedom.
It takes a lot of luck to be able to live in the Bay Area in the first place, and a lot of luck to be able to "co-run two tech companies in Silicon Valley".
If you think this is something anyone can Just Do if they decide to do it, you have fallen pretty hard for a certain kind of capitalist propaganda.
True ownership of software requires the ability to tinker and repair via open or at least licensed source code. But source code almost never makes sense to release for commercial products that must grow to survive and requiring funding to do that.
In the little software business I have been working towards creating, my desire was to offer a educational product for aspiring programmers as a monthly subscription.
Then, once the subscription product is paying the bills and successful, create a single seat offline version of the software and sell that as a package with a book. The book would be a user's guide for the programming language with fun example programs to type in suitable for families and schools who don't have internet to connect to my site.
I have planned networking and sharing features for the online edition that the offline book edition wouldn't have, so there'd be an incentive to pay the subscription to get all that. Nevertheless, I feel an offline version should be made available with a perpetual license in case my company dies, taking the website and web-based programming environment with it and leaving people with nothing.
If others control the things that are important to you, they will at some point find a way to abuse that power. A very important point to keep in mind when making technology choices.
I don't think they're "sucking out souls" so much as people are giving them away willingly. No one taking notes in emacs has this problem. Why Goodnotes 6 and an iPad over org-mode and a laptop? I'm no longer interested in wasting a bunch of my time jailbreaking locked down devices, I'll just buy a PC for every use case.
Subscriptions really opened so many options. A kid can play around an enterprise software for a couple of months with a reasonable price.
But not everything needs to be a subscription. It truly bugs me. We own very powerful laptops and desktops these days. Usually way more powerful than what these softwares run on. It’s a painful experience to pay for both of them, the laptop and unnecessary subscriptions.
With notes, if I ever have the need, I just use plain text / markdown files in a shared folder (I went back to the Dropbox free plan but there are plenty of alternatives). I don't have a habit of note taking though so I never had any attachment to any particular app for that.
I just wish the file sharing things didn't feel so entrenched. I think it's only a matter of time before Dropbox becomes unavailable or no longer offers a free plan (plus it's already restricted to 2 or 3 devices). Using Apple's thing feels unnatural on my Windows PC, using Microsoft's feels unnatural on my Apple devices, using Google's feels like it would require a separate app on every device and you'd still end up in the (imo unnatural feeling) web interface a lot.
With subscription software, or subscription music, you're not paying for a thing, object, device. You're paying for someone's mind. The value isn't you using the app or playing the mp3. The value you pay for is someone else's mind having thought up something and creating that from pure thought stuff. The alternative is building your own from pure thought stuff, ie using your mind. You're subscribing to the creator, not the created result.
Side note: I'm not such a fan of FOSS, free for all get it here no conditions and no questions asked, when we're actually just giving away our mind for free. That's fine as long as others reciprocate, but many don't. The few who reciprocate might be worth it. In essence you're trading between minds, which is the payoff then, not the money.
This is a rationalisation. Your "reasoning" could apply to anything that is transacted at any point in history, but the conclusion does not apply to all those things. "You're not paying for one banana, Michael, you're paying for someone's mind having thought up the idea of a banana plantation"
Well a banana is a thing. You can have ten bananas in stock. You don't have ten softwares in stock. Unless you put it on a carrier and sell it one at a time, like a painting. Software is quite unique when you go the subscription route. What is it you're buying, really? You're buying human labor that was automated, so you don't pay for the labor, but for not having to hire someone. That makes it so unique...
I mean - yes, that is what you're paying for. Bananas, like all products, are engineered.
There was the original domestication, and then there's the modern industrial process of plantation management, picking, shipping, and distribution.
All of which has to be invented, implemented, and organised.
You can - and probably should - question the ethics of same.
But that doesn't change the fact that most places that want bananas do not have have bananas, and making bananas happen in non-banana locations is a very complex process.
Good ideas and organisational ability don't grow on trees.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore. You’re just renting access until someone decides to move the paywall. It’s convenient, sure, but it also feels like losing control over something that used to be ours."
Sounds to me like a fallacy; there always were, are and will be are open-source alternatives to many of these tools and services, but they will never reach the scale and user-friendliness of the pay-to-use versions simply because of incentives. It's a painful and arduous work to make something of value to a particular demographic of users and keeping it so - we simply didn't find any better than for-profit companies way of providing such amazing things.
Yeah, this really hits home. Everything’s turning into a subscription lately, even simple tools that should just run on your own machine.
That’s why we built ChannelVault (https://mestr.io/channelvault.html), as a desktop app (made with Wails + Go) to archive and search Slack workspaces locally for eDiscovery and backups. No SaaS, no recurring fees, no cloud dependency. It just runs on your computer and keeps your data with you. Trying to defy that general trend.
I miss when software felt like something you actually owned, not rented month to month.
Can anyone guess what I’d say is the most important thing to own?
I think it’s going to be AI. you need it running locally. You need to be able to fine tune it for your needs and it needs to prioritize your needs over other considerations.
I share the general sentiment of the post. But I have to say this is one of the multitude posts exactly like that, condemning subscription based model, closed ecosystems etc. without proposing even a theoretical solution.
Yes, things are messed up, FSF is just some fringe radical micro-organisation with no real power, open source movement get EEE'd by the likes of MS, hardware is locked down, your always online games stop working the moment their publishers deem them unprofitable, so what are we doing now?
Yes, things are messed up, but not as much as you describe, especially on the movement level. Focusing on games alone, the GOG store has 11377 games, and you can just download, install and enjoy them, as that's their shtick. DRM free. So that's one of the things you can now do.
Before reading the article I thought this was about trump floating 50 year mortgages. Same kind of issue though, I think.
My naive theory is that the fed targeting N > 0 yearly inflation is _horrendous_ for society. It forces pricing schemes like the article mentions. It encourages cheap, easy money sources which is often at odds with what is best for society. Rent seeking seems to be a hallmark of this system.
On the other end, it gives asset holders a way to grow their share of the pie while doing almost nothing. The more money we print, the less everyone else has (relatively), and the more valuable assets become simply because we printed money - not because any value was created. Our monetary policy is to constantly devalue labor.
To put it succinctly: We’ve made enormous technological strides and people still have to work 8 hours a day and worry if they’ll end up on the streets someday.
Other systems exist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit), yet I see almost 0 mainstream discussion of this issue much less alternatives. My conspiracy theory is of course the billionaires don’t want to change things (they’d likely be reduced to millionaires), so anyone who gets close to talking about this is ignored or canceled.
Seems fine to me. Guy bought Goodnotes 5, and can use Goodnotes 5. He wants Goodnotes 6 to be included for free, but it isn't. That's life. When I got Invasion of the Vorticons, I didn't expect to get Keen Dreams for free too. Nothing new about that
Well, no. If someone offers a "lifetime" license (which I assume wasn't cheap), I expect to get free updates as long as the app exists. There was probably a sentence in the terms & conditions that stated something different, but still, IMHO "lifetime" should mean lifetime, not "until we decide to change our pricing model".
That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.
In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.
It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
> that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
Not really, perpetuities have existed for a long time in finance, even longer has the concept of ‘time value of money’ existed.
You can turn $3m in revenue today into a US treasury bond portfolio that delivers $120k a year. That’s enough to pay for maintenance and minor development of new features.
You can also say: I’ll just charge 120k a year in fees infinitely. But it has the same present value (see time value of money) as 3m today. These worlds are interchangeable, only in the upfront world there is no risk that some of your customers walk away at some point making further upkeep untenable for the remaining customers.
I bought a lifetime gold license to Mediamonkey 3, 15 years ago.
I have since gotten Mediamonkey 4 and Mediamonkey 2024.
Unfortunately I don't like the 2024 refresh, but I can use it if I want to. I would also be completely happy if they just did maintenance/bugfixes on the original version.
If my local ice cream parlor is bold (or foolish) enough to offer a "single payment lifetime ice cream subscription", and I would have got that, yeah, I would expect to never pay for ice cream there again...
Neither the hypothetical ice cream parlor nor Goodnotes is accused of doing that, though.
I don't know when the OP bought his app, but the pricing page from a year ago doesn't say anything about the lifetime purchase being a subscription at all, much less a subscription that includes every new feature in perpetuity.
If someone as a developer has made a naive mistake in lifetime pricing model, with these kind of unrealistic expectations there is no reasonable timeline to correct those mistakes. Instead its easy to just offer subscription and tune pricing later.
In this case I'd actually agree that the author got what they paid for: A lifetime license to Goodnotes version 5. I don't think Goodnotes should have worded it as "lifetime license", the "lifetime" has no real meaning.
Updates should be free, but upgrades don't have to. That's how it worked with software previously. Sometimes you could buy older version of e.g. Office used, and that part we lost with downloads and app stores.
The app store model just sucks for every one. Developers needs to resort to subscriptions, because upgrade pricing isn't supported. Consumers are confused, because why are there multiple versions of the same software?
One issue I do see in this case is that Goodnotes aren't offering a subscription free alternative. That might be due to the AI feature. If that isn't running on device, then that's a recurring cost they placed on themselves.
You're advocating for anti-consumer practices. In response to your strawman, one can easily say that they don't pay for updates to their operating system. So there is clearly a line where we, as consumers, draw a line, right? And this is without addressing the fact they sold a "lifetime" license.
I suppose it would've been fair if Goodnotes were selling their lifetime licenses with the clear remark that this license is for the current version only.
Besides what other replies have mentioned, I'd like to point out that this model of versioning has died a long time ago, especially in the mobile realm. For any app there's only two options, "newest available" or "keep the one I already have installed", assuming that auto-update is not forced down your throat in the latter scenario.
I don't think that's it. I imagine op would be willing to pay to upgrade to Goodnotes 6, at which point he would own that for ever, just like Goodnotes 5. But there is no option to do that.
> Companies prey on those who forget to cancel their free trial. So far, it only happened once to me, but thankfully, I managed to get my refund.
This dark pattern has completely taken over the iOS ecosystem. Apps hide the fact that they’re paid until you’ve gone through several steps—registration, login, setup—making you believe the what you downloaded it for is just one the next screen. And then, bang, a paywall! with a “generous” 3-day free trial and a $3.99/week subscription.
I uninstall such apps immediately and leave a one-star review. I get it, devs need to make money, but there are better ways than this sleazy bs. Unfortunately, too many gurus have normalized this practice by constantly bragging how much revenue they are making.
I get the point and share the annoyance at software subscriptions.
However taking music as a counter point, my life is much simpler and cheaper now I can play any song I like, any time, on any device. I don’t “own” the songs any more, but in practice that doesn’t matter at all to me.
The crucial factor here is competition among providers. If there is no competition, providers can lock people in and bump the price.
But with music, in particular, we have many options and the pricing is very reasonable.
My conclusion is that ownership/subscription is a debate that may be framed wrongly and actually it’s competition/monopolies that we should care about
People buy iPads to try a single app. They hand over hundreds of dollars for a device they do not need, chasing the glint of a feature, the hollow promise of an interface. The tablet sits in their hands like a stone, and they call it freedom. All around them lie simpler paths, cheaper paths, open paths, and they step past them, blind to reason, eager to obey the whisper of marketing. It is a small madness, quiet and ordinary, but it is madness nonetheless.
From turbo capitalist perspective, your work is uncaptured value. A version of photoshop you buy for 300 and don't buy again denies Adobe access to revenue you would be making over time. That purchase gets "cheaper" as you divide it over the life over jobs you do. With subscription, there's a limit to how much upside you get / month before paying again, and allows them to change the terms of the deal as time goes on to suit them.
The ultimate “you will own nothing and be (un)happy” is the state, in EU countries, now taking an average of 57% off our salary in taxes and all kinds of mandatory contributions, and giving us little to nothing in return.
I can live very well with voluntary transactions where I subscribe or not to some product that I’ll never own. But I can’t say no to the state and their eternal threat of violence.
p.S. preemptively, knowing the kind of feedback this content will get: got to love it when Americans give me the “at least you don’t go bankrupt by going to the hospital!”. No, I give the state most my money every time I pay them taxes, so, not a lot of space left to go bankrupt once in the case of a medical emergency. What about letting people choose?
> ...[The State is] now taking an average of 57% off our salary...
Hello. USian here.
Looking at my taxes from last year, The State took 35% of what I earned.
I'd gladly pay 22% more if I got
* Healthcare that I'm not (or am hardly) billed for using and don't have to pay extra every month for [0]
* Mandatory six weeks minimum paid vacation
* Actual employment contracts that mean my employer can't up and say "Whoopsidoodle, this is your three month notice that we're requiring you to stop working from home and either move across the continent to sit your ass in one of our offices or quit. Severance? What severance?!?"; they actually have to justify upending the lives of their workers
* Governments that diswant to waste enormous amounts of money on pointless decades-long occupations of foreign nations
[0] In my state, bottom-end publicly-available health insurance (where I'm expected to pay ~7,000 USD out of pocket before anything is covered) costs ~500 USD a month and is expected to double in cost soon. [1]
[1] The current cost of the health insurance combined with the deductable raises my effective tax burden to 38%. The expected doubling in monthly cost raises it to 40%. [2]
[2] Yes, one typically gets USian health insurance through one's employer. The big appeal of the European system is that if you're unemployed (whether by choice, injury, or the cumulative injuries of advanced age), you don't have to pay out the ass for basic life-sustaining services. I think wonks call this the "social safety net".
57% is the average. If you are here writing on HN, it’s safe to assume you are way above average salary and taxes.
But you are right, I don’t have to pay out the ass for my basic life-sustaining services… what I do have to pay out of the ass, every month, is for someone else’s basic life sustaining services.
> ...what I do have to pay out of the ass, every month, is for someone else’s basic life sustaining services.
Ah.
Well, I've every expectation that you're free to move to some second- or third-tier country that both welcomes newcomers and lets folks fend for themselves, financially. [0] Bon voyage!
[0] I would suggest you move to the US, but we've been (and continue to be) batshit insane about preventing folks from moving in. Sorry!
2) Other than open borders and purchasing civilization for all residents by way of taxation, I absolutely do not approve of the policies you mention, or -given the rest of your comment- the ones you might imagine that I do.
> Funnily enough you are also free to move here...
Actually, probably not. I don't have a college degree, and have nothing special about my background so the odds that I'd be welcomed in to do programming work without having someone to marry are preeeeeeeeety low. (Source: I have US expat family who became foreign citizens and described the process to me.)
We have millions of literally illiterate people living here on sketchy visas for more than a decade now. I’m sure an American with an IT background (degree or no degree) would not be sent away.
Come and help us feed the great wealth redistribution monster. We need more people that actually work to keep supporting the ever increasing numbers of those that don’t want to.
> We have millions of literally illiterate people living here on sketchy visas for more than a decade now.
If you listen to the propaganda, the same is true about the US. And yet, big US tech companies are constantly screaming for more Skilled Worker visa allotments. Odd.
> I’m sure an American with an IT background (degree or no degree) would not be sent away.
I'll trust the report of family who has actually been through the process over the word of someone who's figuratively hopping mad about contributing to a decent social safety net, but lacks the stones required to move off to a second- or third-rate country that has a taxation policy more to their liking, thanx. ;)
Oh, right. Those famous EU Schrödinger emigration laws that let in 30 million people while simultaneously not letting you - specifically - get in.
I'm sure that's your real reason for you not to follow your own advice. Advice that you feel the need to give other people when they don't want to indulge in your socialist fantasies...
The only piece of software I can recall buying is Myst, took awhile for me to save up that cash with just my allowance. Seem to recall it cost $56 in 1993 dollars, that was a great deal of money to a 14 year old in 1993. Adjusting for inflation, you can probably can buy a cheap android tablet and Myst and still have enough left over for the sequels and a pizza.
FOSS covers most of my needs and when it doesn't, I just hack something together. Even as a humanities sort and inept programmer, I can generally manage something which will meet my needs and not only do I own it, I made it. Having this sort of mentality has an interesting side effect, most of what can be bought is always less than and not only because it not something I made but because what can be bought is never quit right for my needs. So the compromise of FOSS becomes less of an issue (even with GIMP) and in those times when it becomes an issue, I make do by hacking up a FOSS offering or building from the ground up.
Admittedly, working around the seg faults that I can't seem to fix is a compromise, but it is a small one and preferable to the alternatives.
Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ...
They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed.
Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month.
Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail.
Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.
Man I think you're spot-on. Back in the day the biggest motivator companies had to make good products was that they would be competing in the market with their own old products.
Not anymore, and it shows
They were also incentivised to stuff as many new features into their products in order to make them look like they were worth upgrading.
Look at how bad Adobe Acrobat got before they even started thinking about subscriptions.
If you have a product and a team working on it, it’s tempting to just keep adding things to the product. You can’t just sit around fixing bugs, they say. When that is precisely what customers would want. Can’t make upsells though and when you’re a business that kind of thing really matters… nobody from within can see that the ship is so heavy it can’t stay afloat anymore. Until it’s sunk.
The video game industry is plagued by this problem. With live-service games becoming commonplace, there has also been a recent trend of games being released in an incomplete state. The shocking part is that multi-million dollar "AAA" game studios are engaging in this behavior. There's also a strong "own nothing" component to the issue.
I'm sorry to write that all those were problems before subscriptions too.
Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.
Sorry, this was all the executives heard:
> Subscription-only will seem great for a while
The ayes have it. Motion passed, now let's discuss the subscription tiers. How many stickers should we include with the premium 'founders' subscription tier?
I continue to maintain that the problem here is not greed but laziness. Make money with less effort or make even more money over a longer term with more effort. Building for the future requires effort and investment and has the potential to make more money than focusing purely on the current quarter.
Expecting something more for little to no effort might be considered a form of greed.
Subscriptions can create an illusion of a deal, because in principle, you’re ostensibly able to benefit more for a fixed price. But are you?
Netflix is a good example. You can watch as much as you want for a flat rate, but how many people watch enough to justify the monthly fee? (Putting aside the question of whether watching so much is actually a benefit in the first place.) Companies recognize the distinction between potential use and actual use, and so in practice, many are paying more for less and subsidizing the outliers that consume more. When actual use exceeds predicted use, the company will raise the price of subscription.
Subscriptions make sense for situations where there are regular maintenance costs or where the benefits are received at a steady and proportional rate.
I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? Everything in one place. It's actually more convenient than streaming services.
>I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? [...] It's actually more convenient than streaming services.
I think your technical sophistication means you're somewhat out-of-touch with what "most" people do.
Most normal people watch Netflix/HBO/etc on smartphones/tablets, or stream devices like Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast puck, Apple TV cube, or the "smart tv app" built-in with their Samsung or LG tv. All of those "mainstream devices used by most" don't make it easy to access torrenting sites or files. Sure, one could hypothetically sideload a torrenting app on a Google Chromecast but now you're beyond the demographic of "most people" because you have extra complexity of also adding some USB storage to save the torrent or point to a local network share.
The type of situations that makes "torrenting more convenient" are people watching everything on a laptop or have a dedicated HTPC media server hooked up to their tv.
I'm technically savvy and it was not easy to sideload Kodi player onto Amazon Fire Stick to legitimately play DVD ISOs. It required a lot of google searches to finally figure it out. (E.g. after realizing VLC app for Fire Stick doesn't work, and then finally stumbling across a "developer setting", and then getting the SMB network path correct, and so on...) Thinking that most people could just torrent is being unrealistic.
Torrents nowadays have <1% the number of people they had a decade ago. It didn't used to be considered technically sophisticated, just a new version of file sharing that everyone used two decades ago.
Attachment to honesty and maintenance of the societal fabric.
Are you asking why more people don't pirate content?
Updates were fewer and far between back then, but they were bigger updates with more features. Now, many subscription services seem content to milk fewer feature upgrades staggered over years.
Yes, upgrades used to be a thing people looked forward to and celebrated.
Now, they're often dreaded, pushy, and frequent.
> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves.
Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors.
Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.
Affinity did have a growing userbase, partly because you could just buy the app for $50 and use it perpetually.
I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".
>Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?
I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.
Graphic designer here. Adobe’s products are the golden standard in the industry and are often the only products used by entire graphic teams, being the odd one out using Affinity’s or (heaven forbid) Corel’s tools makes collaboration difficult (if not entirely impossible) due to how unfriendly and unpredictable portability between apps can be, and unpredictable is the last thing you want in an environment where precision is absolutely essencial.
It’s sad, really. Adobe’s apps are powerful, yes, but they’re stuck in time. They perform horrendously and have terrible UI/X that aren’t even standardised between apps (even something as simple as the icon for their own assets library cloud is not the same between apps).
How I wish someone would come along and eat Adobe’s lunch to force it to pull itself together for once, but alas, that’s unlikely at best.
You're probably right. But Adobe were also very successful when they used the pay-once model.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore."
That's your decision. I've published an music album on Bandcamp. You can buy it, I'll send you a real physical tape and you can _download_ high quality FLAC you own then.
If you like to own things, you have all the possibilities.
But I agree, we maybe tend to forget about high quality stuff, if we consume conveniently low quality streaming content for example on Spotify.
That may be true for your music, but it doesn't refute the author's original statement.
It’s a descision everyone makes, in almost all cases (okay, maybe only in few mobile app cases) "ownable" alternatives exist.
> You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore
This is the more general statement, once again, alternatives exist. I own almost all my apps and tools, and 100% of my music. Either because they are free, or because I bought them. Sometimes I’d would be easier to go the other way, but it’s still (mostly) a choice.
They exist, and then they become subscription only. That is literally what the post is about.
If I have FLAC or mp3 files, they cannot become a subscription.
If I have a working binary that does not need internet, it cannot become a subscription.
If I have invested in making open source solutions work, then I can also figure out ways to continue to own my tools, even if the company goes the subscription way.
Yes, you can snapshot your entire life and try to have it be isolated from online. I know because I do this all the time, but the reality is the world moves forward, and the point of the post is that the trend is towards these customer hostile patterns and away from ownership. As someone focused on digital sovereignty, I very much notice this trend, so I think the point is valid.
Oh for sure. I struggle with keeping my offline workable music collection up to date vs just using spotify. But the pain point of not having music with no internet (the laughable limited option of spotify "download" does not count) is strong enough for me to do it regulary.
(Also I like working offline when I can. Less distractions.)
Guess you haven't downloaded any self-updating executables then? They are very annoying.
Or executables that check silently for a server and pretend to be transparent but really aren't. Very common with music production apps.
Yes I have, but was talking about that:
"binary that does not need internet"
> If I have a working binary that does not need internet, it cannot become a subscription.
Pluton chip and signature/attestation requirements have entered the chat.
> I've published an music album on Bandcamp
Bandcamp is a real treasure for this reason. It and buying physical CDs are the only ways I buy music anymore. Streaming is for suckers.
The point of the article is that Goodnotes stopped selling a lifetime purchase version of the app and a lot of other products go this route. You can't buy things that can't be bought.
It does mention music in the quoted part though. And even regarding goodnotes, it’s a choice to use a tool like that. There are *many* note taking apps.
Not just apps but methods, too. And they're all fishing in the same pool, and they're all trying to sell the same product (a subscription), and they're all trying real hard to integrate AI, after making extra money from selling your notes (or a distillation or statistical analysis thereof).
Not all. Not even close to all. There are tons with no or no mandatory (e. g. Obsidian) subscription.
And there are also tons with no forced or any AI (though plugins by the community kinda to show that many users do want AI)
No, I don't have all the possibilities. I can own movies in physical form, but I can't own the movies I want to own. And it can be even worse. Here I can watch Disney/Pixar movies wonderfully dubbed into local language in cinemas with my grandchildren, but even Disney+ subscription doesn't have these audio tracks.
This is why I collect vinyl records, make my own cassette tapes and have a fairly huge DAS drive with all my media (movies, music, photos, etc). Ironically, I use Plex (non free), but I can pivot very easily if needed.
But even buying your album comes with limitations.
I can not copy and redestribute copies. I can not play it in public spaces for an audience with further ado, etc.
The concept of owning is, rightfully, changing. We are a lot of people who use this planet, and the purist view of ownership simply does not make sense.
You can not own a part of a river to dump chemicals, just for thst to flow to the next owner down stream.
> can not play it in public spaces for an audience with further ado, etc.
Ah that can of worms. When i would play music out loud in the office, the company has to pay a fee to the copyright reimbursement foundation and a fee to the same system representing the artists (actually the studios, but semantics). And that would be for every employee no matter who heard it and if it was audible in public spaces they count for the max allowable. And that comes on top of the fee I'm already paying (double tax, yay). There is a reason most companies pretend they don't know about this system or ask you to use your own devices and headphones.
Who is auditing your office for music copyright issues and why?
Example: in Australia there is an organisation named APRA AMCOS. A friend had a job with them, his job was to visit businesses, see if they were playing music, take evidence of such, and then that business would receive an invoice for the right to play the music.
There were many employees of APRA doing this, in every state, and many cease+desist/lawsuits.
The case was clear cut - you play the music, you paid a fee.
https://www.apraamcos.com.au/
(I guess many countries have similar organisations)
Are you obligated to let them into your private office?
I have zero qualms within myself copying, saving backups, and playing media anywhere and to anyone. I treat lots of ridiculous laws as other people's opinions, and I believe millions of people do the same, and none of us ever get "caught".
The puristic part of ownership totally makes sense. I may own a rifle, but may not shoot people with it. Makes sense? Yes.
> The concept of owning is, rightfully, changing. We are a lot of people who use this planet, and the purist view of ownership simply does not make sense.
This is a bizarre statement. On the one hand, property rights are considered a fundamental human right, and for good reason. And on the other, digital goods don't take up space - no matter how many copies exist. What bearing does the number of people on the planet have in light of this?
All I see is excuses for exploitation by our corporate overlords.
I sympathize with not owning stuff, but I don't get this part:
> I bought the previous “lifetime” version of the app, but for WHAT, since I have to pay for the subscription to access the newest features.
Yeah, that's how "ownership" works. When you own something, nobody else changes it–for better or worse–out from under you.
So, no path to one-time pay for a cumulative upgrade? And, if you stop paying after you "upgraded" the license, you lose access to the thing you bought?
> So, no path to one-time pay for a cumulative upgrade?
That is certainly not a requirement for "ownership", no.
> And, if you stop paying after you "upgraded" the license, you lose access to the thing you bought?
What part of "nobody else changes it–for better or worse–out from under you" is unclear?
It is for cars, there are safety recalls, even long after warranty lapses.
For software I wouldn't expect new features but bug fixes seem almost legislatable.
I have seen it done in the past, in a limited way.
You would buy a product, and it would give you access to the thing you purchased at that version number plus a number of versions afterwards. Pass that point, you needed to buy it again. I think it is a good compromise between "I own the thing I paid" and "I have to give lifetime support for people who purchase an item once many years ago"
Personally, being somewhat technically inclined I find there is rarely much of a reason to pay for the ongoing use of software. The large majority of software I use is open source and self-hostable. The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them, if programming was my livelihood (and I didn't have an employer to pay for them). But programming is just a hobby for me so I'm not inclined to pay for an IDE. Really the only class of software I occasionally pay for is games, but that is always a once-off payment, I don't subscribe for anything.
When I pay for subscriptions, it tends to be for ongoing access to content (music, movies, etc) or infrastructure (storage, server usage, etc). Often that stuff comes bundled with proprietary software but if anything I would much rather it didn't and I could just interact with the content/infrastructure using open source software.
I'm not generally thrilled to be paying a subscription for content, which I would rather own, and indeed I am getting more and more into taking ownership over it. But admittedly there are other benefits to things like music subscriptions, like discoverability and the fact that you don't need a load of storage.
Note taking apps are something I see discussed a lot on HN and there seem to be loads of fancy subscription based services in that space. I don't get it at all - I use Joplin to keep notes and already I feel like that is an over-engineered solution and am considering just going back to text editor + .txt/.md files.
I understand this is tangential to your point, but..
> The JetBrains IDEs are good enough that I would consider paying for them
They are also not subscription-based. You get to keep what you pay for. You have a perpetual license to use it. We can quibble over licenses, but in effect, you keep what you bought forever.
Yes, if you want upgrades, you then need to pay for that, and that's where it starts to resemble a subscription. But, it's literally a "You keep what you bought" model. They let you use a years worth of upgrades and then you can decide if you want to pay to keep those upgrades. Which, frankly, is incredibly fair in my book.
Again, I realize this is not the point of your comment, but your Jetbrains remark spawned this line of thinking related to the context of subscription based software.
I think JetBrains is in general a very consumer friendly company. They contribute heavily to open source as well.
> Yesterday, I checked out the Goodnotes app because I’m planning to buy an iPad to give note-taking on it a try again.
You're setting yourself up for failure from the get go, stop chasing gadgets and 99% of your problems will go away
Counterpoint: my e-ink tablet for note taking has been a huge boon for my productivity both in and out of work
I don't spend my life chasing productivity so that might explain why I find all of this borderline deranged.
do you use it as a notepad?
why not to use actual notepad instead?
They get lost. They aren't backed up. You can't search them. They run out of pages precisely when you forget to bring another one. You can't reorder pages. There's no easy way to keep professional and personal notes separate without carrying two notebooks, or keep them separated and organized by subject without carrying even more of them. Etc etc.
> You can't reorder pages. [...] or keep them separated and organized by subject without carrying even more of them.
It's instructive to think on how this was done in the pre-computer era. We used ring binders, which allow one to easily re-order pages, and group them by subject.
> They run out of pages precisely when you forget to bring another one.
The tablet equivalent is running out of battery when you need it the most.
I've never in my life seen anyone take notes on loose leaf sheets in a ring binder -- not now, and not when I was in school in the pre-computer era. They're not very ergonomic and the holes rip easily on thin note paper. There's a reason everyone always uses spiral-bound or glue-bound. So maybe not as instructive as you think.
And if you use your tablet regularly, you tend to recharge it every night, and they tend to last all day long. I literally can't remember the last time my tablet ran out of battery. They're not like phones in that way.
my daughter uses her ipad for school while I used a paper notebook. She gets way better grades than I ever did. Could she do as well with paper and a pen? maybe - probably? but I've got no leverage...
It's asymmetrical, you publish something online, immediately it is used by social networks or AIs for profit. Vice versa you get an app, it's not even yours.
I think we should strive to avoid playing this game..
But in the end i feel in this particular case, it’s ops fault. He can avoid using that app there’s a world of alternatives for writing apps and organizing apps.
This is one reason open source wins.
The irony is that a lot / most / all? of these apps and services are built and run on open source software.
(is fully closed source software development even still a thing? is there any popular propriatary programming language / editor / runtime / ecosystem?)
Indeed.
However Visual Studio and Xcode are closed source and still popular in some circles.
Most people will still be relying on open source libraries while using those platforms though.
MS Office perhaps? Word, Excel, etc not including Teams
Non-copyleft free software licenses such as the MIT license explicitly grant anyone the right to use the software for any purpose, including for things the original author doesn't approve of, and including building closed-sources apps and services. This is the point of open-source - the original author contributes their software to the open-source commons and then doesn't track who uses it for what. Recent attempts to create licenses that do impose restrictions on Software Freedom 0 are attempts to do ideological advocacy for various leftist causes by means of software licenses, and are not free.
Copyleft free software licenses such as the GPL explicitly grant anyone the right to use the software for any purpose, as long as they also extend this right to their own software. The intent of this license was to infect any novel software built upon GPL-licensed software, forcing it to become free as well; in practice any organization who wants to build a proprietary app or service simply avoids GPL dependencies (or blatantly violates the license terms). Empirically, software companies care more about avoiding being forced to release the source code of their own proprietary software more than they care about using the exclusively-GPL'd software commons as a dependency, and this isn't a problem the license itself can solve.
Funny how I've seen it twice now that when asked what license a published software would adhere to was GPL, but only for non commercial and "you should contact us for commercial use". So you have both he GPL poison pill and non conformity in one package!
I think that's a good option. You get all the benefits of open source as long as you pay it forward. And if you don't want to pay it forward to your users, then I'm not paying it forward to you. This is reciprocal altruism.
I'd suggest using AGPL instead of just GPL.
I upvoted you for "MIT allows anyone to do anything, including things you don't like" and then doenvoted you for "leftist ideological advocacy" - wut?
He may not be infected by GPL, but is definitely infected by American politics.
These aren't related items so there's no comparison.
Let's say you publish a blog post guide on how to set up a MySql cluster and I use that as part of DevOps contract work for a company. Do I owe you money?
What if I form an opinion because of a political piece you published then produce my own blog post?
AI use of public data to produce new information is exactly what we do as people.
LLMs don't form an opinion, they simply regurgitate the opinions of others.
People also do that.
And it's forbidden to do that in certain contexts. Selling a service that regurgitate licensed content is neither legal for humans or machines. German court just reminded OpenAI:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886131
But people get earworms and sing songs out loud that they don't own rights to.
The minute it becomes feasible for the RIAA to charge you a fee every time you have a song playing in your head you can bet they'll be sending you a bill or a legal threat. They'll even come after you for singing when it's profitable enough.
Copyright and performance rights are two separate things. It's completely fine for me to go and perform (not record - that does need a license) the latest hit song until my heart is content.
> It's completely fine for me to go and perform (not record - that does need a license) the latest hit song until my heart is content.
Only in private. Copyright law can give the owner exclusive rights to perform a song publicly. If the lawyers can convince a judge that your singing counts as a public performance you can end up on the hook for not getting or being covered under a performance license.
https://lawwithmiller.com/blogs/copyrights/cover-me-im-legal...
The right to quote allows the use of copyrighted text with limits that are followed by OpenAI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote
I think your copyright argument is focused on media, like music. This appears be a specific exception that applies to text. Music sampling for example is a direct copy of the recording but quoting text, even though it's a copy, is a new work because although the words are the same it's not the original copied (as in the quote is written or typed by OpenAI).
It absolutely is not. This is completely wrong.
People may do that, but that's all LLMs can do.
If posed a novel problem, I think they would generate a new opinion.
Do you mean they simply paste information obtained without citation?
Because if you ask for an opinion on a subject it generates new information itself based on the data gathered.
It does sometimes quote sources, which are properly noted and attributed, but how is that wrong? People write books (for money) all the time and reference sources.
I'm not understanding why you think the LLM is different from a person in how it uses information to produce new work.
No I mean we're in the same community, and perhaps next thing I do is I answer a related question on Stack Overflow that you or someone else can use. Everyone wins, including you, because by writing you also get to structure your thoughts better and perhaps discover some new way.
I mean the degree of use or exchange should matter.
The problem is that StackOverflow can rug-pull you (and the community) at any time.
Things that come to mind:
- adding 'account required' screens so information is harder to access
- harvesting/selling that ip without your explicit consent (although you agreed in the TCs)
I don't understand the issue.
I gave an example of where I'm using your info for my benefit in a different community.
Why does it matter that AI is in the same community, doesn't that actually help my argument because its information is more public?
I want to be part of a community of people. And for decades, that's what sharing information online one.
A third party coming in and saying "hey, everybody stop talking to each other, just talk to us and we'll intermediate and eventually replace every interaction between you, and charge money for it, and fill it up with advertising and eventual enshittification" is not aligned with my goals there at all.
Nostr is a place where we're trying to make that happen.
3rd parties can still come in and try to offer value. But they can not sit between your interactions as clients are interchangeable
That's not happening.
No one is forcing us to exclusively provide information to AI
AI isn't the sole source of information nor are you forced to use it.
The internet is already full of advertising and shit
> AI isn't the sole source of information nor are you forced to use it.
I mean, it's now embedded in all our search engines, so it's kind of hard to obtain information without invoking the hallucination-generating machine
So the problem is with search engines, not the communities they index.
Parent said:
> A third party coming in and saying "hey, everybody stop talking to each other, just talk to us and we'll intermediate and eventually replace every interaction between you, and charge money for it
which doesn't seem to be the case in forums and message boards.
So isn't that the real issue for you? It it wasn't being pushed so heavily would you care as much?
It's like pre installed apps or forced browsers, they cause a pushback where the arguments are all monopolistic but the reality is user annoyance.
Just earlier this month I was at a recording studio and no ILok plugin worked because of a connectivity issue god knows where. Plugins that did cost a lot of cash for them and were in the advertisement material of the studio.
Now even hardware things that used to work for decades need apps. Some guitar pedals need apps to operate. The first generation of those has already become paper weight: after Digitech was bought by Samsung, all the app servers died.
Apps that need a server are never for my behalf, they are purely for creating a dependency. The real feature is allowing an actual backup of the data.
Streaming has the even worse issues. It promises to pay creators, but after listening to only two bands in a month, as an experiment, no visible fraction of the $10 didn’t went to neither of those bands. It probably went to some major label, of course.
I am 100% disillusioned on anything touched by tech and see piracy as a way to resist this crap. So far only piracy has been reliable in having things work as they should when they should.
Yes piracy is more necessary than ever!
In my student years I used DC++ just to watch free movies. With the rise of streaming I kind of forgot about it, until I got annoyed.
I don't like the Spotify. Most songs I like are available, but the 'playlist' experience is terrible. A lot of songs are actually part of an album. "Is an album like a playlist on a disk?" my kid asked. No it's not, a playlist is a randomly assembled list of songs, but an album are songs who belong together, they are the album.
And video streaming is the opposite. The experience is nice, but there is so much missing even if you have multiple streaming subscriptions.
Besides convenience there is politics, what if Trump wants a list of everyone who thumbed up 'The White House Effect' on Netflix?
So, after many years I took an old Raspberry 3 and started torrenting again. To my surprise piratebay is still active (although my old account doesn't work anymore, no clue how to provide new content).
I'm really happy, the Raspberry has a Samba fileshare. Just download the VLC app on your smart tv and you can stream anything you like.
I know there are more advanced solutions to torrenting, but I like this simple approach, and it makes me completely independent. Let's start sharing great content again!
I was pulled back into it after a work colleague showed me a Netflix-like website that seems to have all the films ever made. Apparently there's several of those, they're just invisible to Google.
In Germany we can't really torrent from home, so those sites are very widespread. People just watch stuff at work during lunch, after hours when waiting for a colleague to finish, etc...
I'm not gonna pay for Amazon because it's Amazon, or Disney because it's Disney. And I'm about to kill my Netflix, since it's also complains about Apple Private Relay which I'm not gonna turn off as much as I also hate Apple.
Funny enough, even the CTO of a past company I worked was back into piracy, even after his company had a successful exit. People are just tired of those services, period.
We used to own tools that made us productive. Now we rent tools that make someone else profitable. Subscriptions are not about recurring value but recurring billing and at some point every product decision starts bending toward dependence instead of ownership.
For me it's more like "people used to make free tools so that nobody owns them, no everybody complains they don't come for free without effort". Think of gcc, linux, and many others. There was a huge effort invested in them by people that could sell their knowledge and choose to share it.
We can build today complete products with nothing paid on the tools. This was NOT the case 30 years ago.
Back when subscriptions started to be a thing some people (myself included) were cautiously optimistic.
The problem with paid upfront and paid upgrades was that it eventually resulted in bloated programs because the only way to continue having a business was to add features.
Subscriptions, in theory, could leave the focus on user experience and fixing bugs, because in the end the people who are paying are those that like your product as it is now.
Now of course this optimism was misplaced. Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
I agree with your comment, but a minor nitpick:
> Subscriptions permitted to move as much of the logic as possible out into cloud.
Constant internet connection permitted that. Cloud is only a convenience: you don't have to install and update anything locally, it is updated centrally for everyone by knowledgeable admins instead of some users having problems locally and needing support for each upgrade.
I know this from experience, one company has a local desktop version of our product, but they complain that it requires work from administrator, because users can't upgrade their desktop clients automatically, so they want local-hosted webpage version. This is SCADA system for district heating.
Normal internet users don't want to deal with local-hosted own servers, they want to press a button and it should work. Cloud based systems make that a little more possible.
> Constant internet connection permitted that.
On a technical level yes. But unless you are selling expensive hardware widgets it can be hard to justify constant upkeep cost of servers without a recurring revenue.
That said I too lived through hosting on premises web services that we later pushed to cloud due to the hassle of maintenance. Self hosting is great when you have a dedicated team to keep it running.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You can’t be expected to get a subscription, but you also can’t be expected to charge for an upgrade.
Now, I hate subscriptions as much as the next person, but I can’t leave this blog without feeling that the op is a bit entitled.
For what it matters, my opinion is that GoodNotes is doing everything correctly. If you bought a 5 lifetime, you can still use it. It’s the same app (that’s interesting, there is a toggle to go between 5 and 6) so I’m assuming it’s still getting bug fixes for new os releases and similar. 5 was a free update to 4, and 6 was released in 2023 (!) so that license was good for a while. They offer discounts if you bought 5, so op point of it being cheaper on a subscription might be wrong. And according to their website they still offer lifetime licenses for 6, bar the AI stuff (which is probably an ongoing cost for them? No idea if it’s local or not).
Plenty of scammy apps and it would be nice to go back to owning things, but this is the same experience if not better to when you could buy software on a cd and keep it a couple decades ago.
> but I can’t leave this blog without feeling that the op is a bit entitled
Not a bit. Extremely entitled. The OP even believes that if they bought a permanent license, they should be entitled to upgrades forever. I really wonder what the mental model of business looks like in their head.
Maybe a basic note app does not require an account and subscription. Maybe it does not mandate an entire organization and marketing team to deal with security updates. The economy around marketing these types of basic apps is crazy.
I think the op is likely poorly wording their feeling or perhaps are early in exploring their frustrations. They may sound entitled because of this. Their intuition does ring true however. Its 2025 and we are talking a notes app. Handheld pdas had notes applications in the 80s why on earth would we need a subscription let alone dozens of competing subscriptions to take notes. OP will probably find they can get what they need from copy left software and happily ignore this noise in time.
As someone who has used Goodnotes 5 for years, my experience is that it’s getting new bugs—not new bug fixes. Anecdotal of course, but since Goodnotes 6 released, I’ve started seeing frequent issues with erased text not disappearing and menus behaving poorly. This is on a brand new iPad Air.
I own everything I rely on in my digital life and am pretty happy.
Just stop using proprietary software, as it is never possible to own it no matter how much money you pay.
FOSS solves every software need I have, and likely for most people that choose to invest in learning it.
I’m slowly going more and more down this route but I’m curious about what you or others are using for banking apps and parking payment apps. I actually want to switch to graphene OS but there are always these rare corner cases.
Today alone I payed something like 20% extra because I didn’t want to download an app to pay for parking (other parking places won’t even accept payment without the app) and I had to download a closed source app to activate a sim card.
Graphene is great but you will face many choices where you will just need to say no to something others consider normal. Or have a second normie phone to use as needed.
Not carried a cell phone in over 5 years, and only carry any internet capable devices at all when traveling.
Generally I only carry cash, a mechanical watch, and an ID.
For banking I use webapps.
For parking I choose lots that accept cash even if I have to walk a bit more.
Never stopped me from doing anything I wanted to do in the SF Bay Area.
I've been working in this direction as well. I treat it like a game. Sure I /could/ just order thing off the internet, but if it were a scavenger hunt, where could I find thing at a locally owned business and pay cash?
Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard, sometimes I give up and order it online. But the more people do this the more it will (continue to) be a supported use-case.
I've had some interesting conversations, interacting with people in the real world, just by going into a store and telling them I'm trying to find a thing. I tell them what game I'm playing, they're usually pleased to hear it and happy to help if they can.
>I’m slowly going more and more down this route but I’m curious about what you or others are using for banking apps and parking payment apps. I actually want to switch to graphene OS but there are always these rare corner cases.
I'm too busy right now, but I think my medium-term plan is to get a local bank and just use them locally like the old days. I'm stuck on iPhone for a variety of reasons, but I'd still like to get my app count down as much as possible. Plus if my phone falls into a river I'll still be able to do my banking. I think the convenience hit will be worth it.
They are slowly removing branches in the UK. Opening hours are only a few hours a week in certain places. You have to use the app to verify online purchases in my case. There is no workaround.
I basically firewall stuff like the bank apps and other stuff on my phone. My PC for the most part is just Debian Linux and my car is an older vehicle that can be literally repaired indefinitely due to it being more utilitarian.
I suggest going to the mobile phone store and asking them to activate it. There is almost always a way. Bring a decoy dumbphone if you want. And if they say no, try another store until they say yes or refund you.
Congratulations, I guess? Not everybody is lucky enough to be in your situation.
No luck needed. It was a series of intentional choices anyone could make if they wished.
I co-run two tech companies in silicon valley, maintain several online communities, organize events, have an active social life, travel a lot, have many tech hobbies, go to shows and events, etc.
I am hardly the amish person people tend to imagine.
FOSS software can work for virtually anyone in the modern world that wants freedom.
Who has the technical skill to use a command line and/or a build system.
So maybe 5% of the population on a good day.
You can install graphene os on a phone using a USB cable and a web page.
It takes a lot of luck to be able to live in the Bay Area in the first place, and a lot of luck to be able to "co-run two tech companies in Silicon Valley".
If you think this is something anyone can Just Do if they decide to do it, you have fallen pretty hard for a certain kind of capitalist propaganda.
True ownership of software requires the ability to tinker and repair via open or at least licensed source code. But source code almost never makes sense to release for commercial products that must grow to survive and requiring funding to do that.
In the little software business I have been working towards creating, my desire was to offer a educational product for aspiring programmers as a monthly subscription.
Then, once the subscription product is paying the bills and successful, create a single seat offline version of the software and sell that as a package with a book. The book would be a user's guide for the programming language with fun example programs to type in suitable for families and schools who don't have internet to connect to my site.
I have planned networking and sharing features for the online edition that the offline book edition wouldn't have, so there'd be an incentive to pay the subscription to get all that. Nevertheless, I feel an offline version should be made available with a perpetual license in case my company dies, taking the website and web-based programming environment with it and leaving people with nothing.
> True ownership of software requires the ability to tinker and repair via open or at least licensed source code
I think I'd settle for a well-documented plugin API? This used to be more or less the dominant model before everything moved to the cloud
If others control the things that are important to you, they will at some point find a way to abuse that power. A very important point to keep in mind when making technology choices.
Why would you trust any company Google, Apple, Microsoft, any company like them, to be in control of stuff that's important to you.
There's really no excuse if you're talking about notes.
I don't think they're "sucking out souls" so much as people are giving them away willingly. No one taking notes in emacs has this problem. Why Goodnotes 6 and an iPad over org-mode and a laptop? I'm no longer interested in wasting a bunch of my time jailbreaking locked down devices, I'll just buy a PC for every use case.
Subscriptions really opened so many options. A kid can play around an enterprise software for a couple of months with a reasonable price. But not everything needs to be a subscription. It truly bugs me. We own very powerful laptops and desktops these days. Usually way more powerful than what these softwares run on. It’s a painful experience to pay for both of them, the laptop and unnecessary subscriptions.
https://blog.with.audio/posts/why-everything-doesnt-have-to-...
Coming up next, at https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight ...
With notes, if I ever have the need, I just use plain text / markdown files in a shared folder (I went back to the Dropbox free plan but there are plenty of alternatives). I don't have a habit of note taking though so I never had any attachment to any particular app for that.
I just wish the file sharing things didn't feel so entrenched. I think it's only a matter of time before Dropbox becomes unavailable or no longer offers a free plan (plus it's already restricted to 2 or 3 devices). Using Apple's thing feels unnatural on my Windows PC, using Microsoft's feels unnatural on my Apple devices, using Google's feels like it would require a separate app on every device and you'd still end up in the (imo unnatural feeling) web interface a lot.
True ownership of Software is only in Open Source. Unless you can change things yourself in that software, it isn't really ownership.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion.
I always say that "Privacy is for Nerds", guess I can start adding Ownership as well.
With subscription software, or subscription music, you're not paying for a thing, object, device. You're paying for someone's mind. The value isn't you using the app or playing the mp3. The value you pay for is someone else's mind having thought up something and creating that from pure thought stuff. The alternative is building your own from pure thought stuff, ie using your mind. You're subscribing to the creator, not the created result.
Side note: I'm not such a fan of FOSS, free for all get it here no conditions and no questions asked, when we're actually just giving away our mind for free. That's fine as long as others reciprocate, but many don't. The few who reciprocate might be worth it. In essence you're trading between minds, which is the payoff then, not the money.
I'm not for or against, just thinking out loud.
This is a rationalisation. Your "reasoning" could apply to anything that is transacted at any point in history, but the conclusion does not apply to all those things. "You're not paying for one banana, Michael, you're paying for someone's mind having thought up the idea of a banana plantation"
Well a banana is a thing. You can have ten bananas in stock. You don't have ten softwares in stock. Unless you put it on a carrier and sell it one at a time, like a painting. Software is quite unique when you go the subscription route. What is it you're buying, really? You're buying human labor that was automated, so you don't pay for the labor, but for not having to hire someone. That makes it so unique...
I mean - yes, that is what you're paying for. Bananas, like all products, are engineered.
There was the original domestication, and then there's the modern industrial process of plantation management, picking, shipping, and distribution.
All of which has to be invented, implemented, and organised.
You can - and probably should - question the ethics of same.
But that doesn't change the fact that most places that want bananas do not have have bananas, and making bananas happen in non-banana locations is a very complex process.
Good ideas and organisational ability don't grow on trees.
Everything comes full circle.
Companies own you - they pay a subscription (your salary) to rent you. Wouldn't it be great if they could pay a one-time fee to own you forever?
> Companies own you - they pay a subscription (your salary) to rent you.
They rent my work, not me, and if I am paid for project or contract work, they get to keep what I made after they've stopped paying me.
What
I agree with the general sentiment, but it seems fair to me that an old "lifetime" license won't have access to new features.
Why future tense? We’re already there.
Feels like every day I run into another reason to never stop taking notes by hand in good old cursive.
"It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion. You don’t really own your apps, your music, or even your tools anymore. You’re just renting access until someone decides to move the paywall. It’s convenient, sure, but it also feels like losing control over something that used to be ours."
Sounds to me like a fallacy; there always were, are and will be are open-source alternatives to many of these tools and services, but they will never reach the scale and user-friendliness of the pay-to-use versions simply because of incentives. It's a painful and arduous work to make something of value to a particular demographic of users and keeping it so - we simply didn't find any better than for-profit companies way of providing such amazing things.
Yeah, this really hits home. Everything’s turning into a subscription lately, even simple tools that should just run on your own machine.
That’s why we built ChannelVault (https://mestr.io/channelvault.html), as a desktop app (made with Wails + Go) to archive and search Slack workspaces locally for eDiscovery and backups. No SaaS, no recurring fees, no cloud dependency. It just runs on your computer and keeps your data with you. Trying to defy that general trend.
I miss when software felt like something you actually owned, not rented month to month.
This is one reason I find local-first software so appealing. You sell it as improving UX and backdoor in user freedom.
Can anyone guess what I’d say is the most important thing to own?
I think it’s going to be AI. you need it running locally. You need to be able to fine tune it for your needs and it needs to prioritize your needs over other considerations.
Some companies are already eroding the idea of general purpose computing ...
The most important thing to own is a CPU that isn't vendor-locked.
I share the general sentiment of the post. But I have to say this is one of the multitude posts exactly like that, condemning subscription based model, closed ecosystems etc. without proposing even a theoretical solution.
Yes, things are messed up, FSF is just some fringe radical micro-organisation with no real power, open source movement get EEE'd by the likes of MS, hardware is locked down, your always online games stop working the moment their publishers deem them unprofitable, so what are we doing now?
Yes, things are messed up, but not as much as you describe, especially on the movement level. Focusing on games alone, the GOG store has 11377 games, and you can just download, install and enjoy them, as that's their shtick. DRM free. So that's one of the things you can now do.
> without proposing even a theoretical solution.
The solution is quite simple and practical.
* Install Fdroid.
* Do not pay some silly rent for apps.
> Yesterday, I checked out the Goodnotes app because I’m planning to buy an iPad to give note-taking on it a try again.
I would also reconsider HW manufacturer that tries to push Newspeak "side-loading" instead of "installing".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideloading
Get an Android device.
Install F-Droid.
Have a wide array of apps that are free as in beer as well as in freedom.
You don't have to use rent-seeking proprietary junk. There's alternatives out there.
F-Droid can not work in the future. Android is controlled by Google. It already tries to block sideloading apps.
You can always install GrapheneOS or LineageOS - those are still Android, but not controlled by Google.
Before reading the article I thought this was about trump floating 50 year mortgages. Same kind of issue though, I think.
My naive theory is that the fed targeting N > 0 yearly inflation is _horrendous_ for society. It forces pricing schemes like the article mentions. It encourages cheap, easy money sources which is often at odds with what is best for society. Rent seeking seems to be a hallmark of this system.
On the other end, it gives asset holders a way to grow their share of the pie while doing almost nothing. The more money we print, the less everyone else has (relatively), and the more valuable assets become simply because we printed money - not because any value was created. Our monetary policy is to constantly devalue labor.
To put it succinctly: We’ve made enormous technological strides and people still have to work 8 hours a day and worry if they’ll end up on the streets someday.
Other systems exist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit), yet I see almost 0 mainstream discussion of this issue much less alternatives. My conspiracy theory is of course the billionaires don’t want to change things (they’d likely be reduced to millionaires), so anyone who gets close to talking about this is ignored or canceled.
Seems fine to me. Guy bought Goodnotes 5, and can use Goodnotes 5. He wants Goodnotes 6 to be included for free, but it isn't. That's life. When I got Invasion of the Vorticons, I didn't expect to get Keen Dreams for free too. Nothing new about that
Well, no. If someone offers a "lifetime" license (which I assume wasn't cheap), I expect to get free updates as long as the app exists. There was probably a sentence in the terms & conditions that stated something different, but still, IMHO "lifetime" should mean lifetime, not "until we decide to change our pricing model".
That's an impossible model though - you're asking somebody to do unlimited work for you forever, for a fixed one-off price.
In that world nobody should ever ever sell a lifetime license, it's a huge responsibility with strictly limited upside. Imo "Use the current-ish version forever" is the only reasonable expectation, and that's a fair trade.
It's expectations like this that drive subscription models. People do (quite reasonably) want ongoing support and updates, but that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
> that takes continual work, so the only way to make that possible is to somehow provide ongoing funding.
Not really, perpetuities have existed for a long time in finance, even longer has the concept of ‘time value of money’ existed.
You can turn $3m in revenue today into a US treasury bond portfolio that delivers $120k a year. That’s enough to pay for maintenance and minor development of new features.
You can also say: I’ll just charge 120k a year in fees infinitely. But it has the same present value (see time value of money) as 3m today. These worlds are interchangeable, only in the upfront world there is no risk that some of your customers walk away at some point making further upkeep untenable for the remaining customers.
I bought a lifetime gold license to Mediamonkey 3, 15 years ago.
I have since gotten Mediamonkey 4 and Mediamonkey 2024.
Unfortunately I don't like the 2024 refresh, but I can use it if I want to. I would also be completely happy if they just did maintenance/bugfixes on the original version.
Somebody once gave me a free ice cream, so why should I ever pay for ice cream?
If my local ice cream parlor is bold (or foolish) enough to offer a "single payment lifetime ice cream subscription", and I would have got that, yeah, I would expect to never pay for ice cream there again...
Neither the hypothetical ice cream parlor nor Goodnotes is accused of doing that, though.
I don't know when the OP bought his app, but the pricing page from a year ago doesn't say anything about the lifetime purchase being a subscription at all, much less a subscription that includes every new feature in perpetuity.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240712162421/https://www.goodn...
you are comparing a consumable food product with a software. I don't eat my software and want more...
If someone as a developer has made a naive mistake in lifetime pricing model, with these kind of unrealistic expectations there is no reasonable timeline to correct those mistakes. Instead its easy to just offer subscription and tune pricing later.
In this case I'd actually agree that the author got what they paid for: A lifetime license to Goodnotes version 5. I don't think Goodnotes should have worded it as "lifetime license", the "lifetime" has no real meaning.
Updates should be free, but upgrades don't have to. That's how it worked with software previously. Sometimes you could buy older version of e.g. Office used, and that part we lost with downloads and app stores.
The app store model just sucks for every one. Developers needs to resort to subscriptions, because upgrade pricing isn't supported. Consumers are confused, because why are there multiple versions of the same software?
One issue I do see in this case is that Goodnotes aren't offering a subscription free alternative. That might be due to the AI feature. If that isn't running on device, then that's a recurring cost they placed on themselves.
You're advocating for anti-consumer practices. In response to your strawman, one can easily say that they don't pay for updates to their operating system. So there is clearly a line where we, as consumers, draw a line, right? And this is without addressing the fact they sold a "lifetime" license.
I suppose it would've been fair if Goodnotes were selling their lifetime licenses with the clear remark that this license is for the current version only.
Besides what other replies have mentioned, I'd like to point out that this model of versioning has died a long time ago, especially in the mobile realm. For any app there's only two options, "newest available" or "keep the one I already have installed", assuming that auto-update is not forced down your throat in the latter scenario.
I don't think that's it. I imagine op would be willing to pay to upgrade to Goodnotes 6, at which point he would own that for ever, just like Goodnotes 5. But there is no option to do that.
I don't think you actually grasped the core of the post if this is your conclusion.
right now the president of a certain powerful country is proposing 50 year mortgages.
50 year mortgages is a way for you to own nothing under the guise of owning.
they have talking about owning nothing for a while at Davos - yet they keep accumulating stuff.
> Companies prey on those who forget to cancel their free trial. So far, it only happened once to me, but thankfully, I managed to get my refund.
This dark pattern has completely taken over the iOS ecosystem. Apps hide the fact that they’re paid until you’ve gone through several steps—registration, login, setup—making you believe the what you downloaded it for is just one the next screen. And then, bang, a paywall! with a “generous” 3-day free trial and a $3.99/week subscription.
I uninstall such apps immediately and leave a one-star review. I get it, devs need to make money, but there are better ways than this sleazy bs. Unfortunately, too many gurus have normalized this practice by constantly bragging how much revenue they are making.
I get the point and share the annoyance at software subscriptions.
However taking music as a counter point, my life is much simpler and cheaper now I can play any song I like, any time, on any device. I don’t “own” the songs any more, but in practice that doesn’t matter at all to me.
The crucial factor here is competition among providers. If there is no competition, providers can lock people in and bump the price.
But with music, in particular, we have many options and the pricing is very reasonable.
My conclusion is that ownership/subscription is a debate that may be framed wrongly and actually it’s competition/monopolies that we should care about
People buy iPads to try a single app. They hand over hundreds of dollars for a device they do not need, chasing the glint of a feature, the hollow promise of an interface. The tablet sits in their hands like a stone, and they call it freedom. All around them lie simpler paths, cheaper paths, open paths, and they step past them, blind to reason, eager to obey the whisper of marketing. It is a small madness, quiet and ordinary, but it is madness nonetheless.
Yeah that also struck me as the most absurd part of the write up
This popular phrase may have even more impact as "You will own nothing and things will own you."
Anyone remember what this quote is from? You will own nothing and be happy?
World economic forums talk and 0romotional materials on "the great reset"
I’d love to see a mass movement back to ownership even just in the digital realm.
Imagine if it became cool to have dvd and cd collections again. I feel like gen z could bring this back.
> It’s funny how “ownership” in the digital world has become an illusion.
it's like every "innovation" now brings with it convenience at a higher cost and takes away ownership and often features
personally i'm quite sick of digital nothingness. its all transient.
i want to get more into real world things that have texture, weight and permanence.
Cherrytree is free and open source.
From turbo capitalist perspective, your work is uncaptured value. A version of photoshop you buy for 300 and don't buy again denies Adobe access to revenue you would be making over time. That purchase gets "cheaper" as you divide it over the life over jobs you do. With subscription, there's a limit to how much upside you get / month before paying again, and allows them to change the terms of the deal as time goes on to suit them.
As far as I'm concerned, the iPad is just a web browser with some messaging features. There is no App Store.
iSH and a-shell offer some (emulated, non-JIT) Linux CLI functionality on iPad, which is quite functional for compiled apps, e.g. taskwarrior.
Yes, I've played around with a-shell but I consider it more of a toy than a tool. It's honestly kind of weird that Apple allows it.
Don't wanna be the guy who brings up Black Mirror (S07E01) but, well, yeah.
If you don't own it, then pirating it isn't a crime.
The ultimate “you will own nothing and be (un)happy” is the state, in EU countries, now taking an average of 57% off our salary in taxes and all kinds of mandatory contributions, and giving us little to nothing in return.
I can live very well with voluntary transactions where I subscribe or not to some product that I’ll never own. But I can’t say no to the state and their eternal threat of violence.
p.S. preemptively, knowing the kind of feedback this content will get: got to love it when Americans give me the “at least you don’t go bankrupt by going to the hospital!”. No, I give the state most my money every time I pay them taxes, so, not a lot of space left to go bankrupt once in the case of a medical emergency. What about letting people choose?
> ...[The State is] now taking an average of 57% off our salary...
Hello. USian here.
Looking at my taxes from last year, The State took 35% of what I earned.
I'd gladly pay 22% more if I got
* Healthcare that I'm not (or am hardly) billed for using and don't have to pay extra every month for [0]
* Mandatory six weeks minimum paid vacation
* Actual employment contracts that mean my employer can't up and say "Whoopsidoodle, this is your three month notice that we're requiring you to stop working from home and either move across the continent to sit your ass in one of our offices or quit. Severance? What severance?!?"; they actually have to justify upending the lives of their workers
* Governments that diswant to waste enormous amounts of money on pointless decades-long occupations of foreign nations
[0] In my state, bottom-end publicly-available health insurance (where I'm expected to pay ~7,000 USD out of pocket before anything is covered) costs ~500 USD a month and is expected to double in cost soon. [1]
[1] The current cost of the health insurance combined with the deductable raises my effective tax burden to 38%. The expected doubling in monthly cost raises it to 40%. [2]
[2] Yes, one typically gets USian health insurance through one's employer. The big appeal of the European system is that if you're unemployed (whether by choice, injury, or the cumulative injuries of advanced age), you don't have to pay out the ass for basic life-sustaining services. I think wonks call this the "social safety net".
57% is the average. If you are here writing on HN, it’s safe to assume you are way above average salary and taxes.
But you are right, I don’t have to pay out the ass for my basic life-sustaining services… what I do have to pay out of the ass, every month, is for someone else’s basic life sustaining services.
> ...what I do have to pay out of the ass, every month, is for someone else’s basic life sustaining services.
Ah.
Well, I've every expectation that you're free to move to some second- or third-tier country that both welcomes newcomers and lets folks fend for themselves, financially. [0] Bon voyage!
[0] I would suggest you move to the US, but we've been (and continue to be) batshit insane about preventing folks from moving in. Sorry!
Why don't you take your own advice and move to the European paradise you crave, why torment yourself?
Writing from a third-tier country that welcomes nationalizations, confiscations, extortions, and all the other policies you'd approve of.
1) See [0]
2) Other than open borders and purchasing civilization for all residents by way of taxation, I absolutely do not approve of the policies you mention, or -given the rest of your comment- the ones you might imagine that I do.
[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45900399>
Funnily enough you are also free to move here where you can have all that safety net you say is so great, and yet, you keep living in the USA.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
> Funnily enough you are also free to move here...
Actually, probably not. I don't have a college degree, and have nothing special about my background so the odds that I'd be welcomed in to do programming work without having someone to marry are preeeeeeeeety low. (Source: I have US expat family who became foreign citizens and described the process to me.)
We have millions of literally illiterate people living here on sketchy visas for more than a decade now. I’m sure an American with an IT background (degree or no degree) would not be sent away.
Come and help us feed the great wealth redistribution monster. We need more people that actually work to keep supporting the ever increasing numbers of those that don’t want to.
> We have millions of literally illiterate people living here on sketchy visas for more than a decade now.
If you listen to the propaganda, the same is true about the US. And yet, big US tech companies are constantly screaming for more Skilled Worker visa allotments. Odd.
> I’m sure an American with an IT background (degree or no degree) would not be sent away.
I'll trust the report of family who has actually been through the process over the word of someone who's figuratively hopping mad about contributing to a decent social safety net, but lacks the stones required to move off to a second- or third-rate country that has a taxation policy more to their liking, thanx. ;)
Oh, right. Those famous EU Schrödinger emigration laws that let in 30 million people while simultaneously not letting you - specifically - get in.
I'm sure that's your real reason for you not to follow your own advice. Advice that you feel the need to give other people when they don't want to indulge in your socialist fantasies...
The only piece of software I can recall buying is Myst, took awhile for me to save up that cash with just my allowance. Seem to recall it cost $56 in 1993 dollars, that was a great deal of money to a 14 year old in 1993. Adjusting for inflation, you can probably can buy a cheap android tablet and Myst and still have enough left over for the sequels and a pizza.
FOSS covers most of my needs and when it doesn't, I just hack something together. Even as a humanities sort and inept programmer, I can generally manage something which will meet my needs and not only do I own it, I made it. Having this sort of mentality has an interesting side effect, most of what can be bought is always less than and not only because it not something I made but because what can be bought is never quit right for my needs. So the compromise of FOSS becomes less of an issue (even with GIMP) and in those times when it becomes an issue, I make do by hacking up a FOSS offering or building from the ground up.
Admittedly, working around the seg faults that I can't seem to fix is a compromise, but it is a small one and preferable to the alternatives.