Item — HN Reader

If you pay for your software through a subscription, of course, no problem.

You paid for software once? Well, tough luck. Your older versions will no longer be supported because we can't afford developers because you stopped giving us money.

There is no way anyone is going to be supporting old formats while providing free updates. This makes no business sense.

2 comments

When updating from one format to another, you should generally write code to convert it. Once you have that code, it should be trivial to update old -> new format by using all the intermediate software versions, or not as trivially, you can have a transformer from all previous versions to the current in your latest releases.

That very much depends on the license.

Many licenses include future updates.

I am far more likely to pay for software that supports file formats in the future.

> Many licenses include future updates.

May be so, but likely not in the long run. Developers don't quite want to work for free, and providing free updates is a bad business model if licensing model is "one time fee".

They may say "free updates" to lure you in, but updates are only provided for your version. As soon as a new major version comes out, your current version will stop receiving updates. You will have to upgrade to the latest version at some point, and this upgrade is definitely not going to be free.

You get what you pay for.