They actually just reverted this change within the last week (of course with accompanying “we love listening to your feedback!!!1!” eyeroll inducing messaging).
on the individual level you can make mistakes. on an organizational level allowing this kind of mistakes means they discussed it and nobody found a problem with it. its a sign of disfunction.
Not my problem, and not a valid problem in the first place, and not the charge against them.
There are an infinite number of ways to make enough money to survive.
You can sell your work honestly without artificially witholding work that is already done so you can sell it a million times over, and get people to do it by artificially creating or at least artificially preserving a pain point and randsoming the salve.
That is not simply doing work and paying for that work.
If a thing is at all useful enough that anyone even wants to use it, then there are a million businesses that would love to pay you for expert installation and training and support of perfectly free software.
Ahh but that doesn't scale. You can sell your time to a few people and live very very well, but you can't sell your time to a billion people.
No one is "trying to survive" in this story. What a strange and incredible thing to even try to say.
It's almost like they probably should have figured out something so important by now. I guess they didn't have a plan B after they didn't get bought out. Sucks to suck.
The auto update “feature” was only ever required so they could get everyone on to a version that they could remotely shut down to force subscription revenue. Makes perfect sense that it was a paid “pro” feature before to not be forced: you were already doing what they wanted. Now everyone is on 4.0 and they can turn it off again.
If they are the kind of people who would try something, then they are still the same people and that problem did not go away.
They will try something else again, and may in fact already be failing to work to my advantage right now in ways I just can't see.
Once you know that, I prefer to just live without whatever the awesome thing is, somehow I will survive.