Item — HN Reader

I was expecting to read a criticism of the new version. (I haven't used it myself yet, and I haven't bought ST2 either—I keep using the trial version.)

Instead what I got from this post is that the bugs are being rapidly fixed, and it is a major update for a reason, because of the breaking changes. Well, that's cool.

It reminds me of people bitching that iOS 6 runs slow on iPhone 3Gs. I don't see how abandoning an old version to make something awesome and charge for it is a “dick move”. You paid for it, and you decide whether to pay for the update.

I wouldn't be suprised to learn it was hard to backport some fixes because of the breaking changes, and I don't see anything immoral in deciding it just isn't worth the effort.

2 comments

I think the point is that the bugs are being fixed in a new paid release, and not in the release many people paid for.

The only thing, imo, that this does is harm the relationship between people developing software who would like to be paid for it and their customers. If you charge people money for something it behooves you to keep releasing fixes and point releases for it regularly, not to disappear and release a paid upgrade with the things fixed that should be part of the current release. I don't know of any legal or moral obligation to do it, but it certainly is a good business move for the ecosystem.

> It reminds me of people bitching that iOS 6 runs slow on iPhone 3Gs.

Yeah, because last release of iPhone was iPhone 3G. And because there were only one bug fixed release of iOS on iPhone 4 and 4S. Oh, wait, that's not true.