[freetanga]

I bought my house. I bought my car. I bought my laptop. I bought my servers. I don’t need to pay for them every month.

In broad terms I am tired of having to make a paycheck every month and having a long list of companies wanting to take a slice from it for “making my life magically better”. Hidden price hikes, dark patterns to cancel, etc.

[pembrook]

You haven’t addressed any of my questions, but I’ll play along.

Im also tired of having to pay my employees a slice of my revenue every month for “making my business magically better.” Hidden salary demands, dark patterns to fire them, etc.

I own my car. I own my laptop. Why can’t I own you?

I guess what I’m saying is, why do you think the code you write for your employer deserves to be sold on a subscription model (salary) —- yet you don’t afford the same opportunity to indie developers?

[alexschnapp]

Wait this doesn’t make sense. They own the code I wrote for them. The ‘subscription’ is for future updates of that code. They can keep the version and never update. If I quit they still have what I wrote.

[pembrook]

And they pay you 10,000X the cost of $3/month for the ability to own that code.

But it seems you still aren’t following the hypocrisy inherent here.

If this one time payment + ownership model is so great for everyone as you say, why aren’t you working exclusively as a project-based freelancer? Why hasn’t your employer fired you the minute you finish every project?

Is the company that hired you stupid? Are you taking advantage of them?

Or does the subscription model for software only make sense when you’re the one selling it?

[joshmanders]

Your house and car also have monthly subscriptions that come with them. Electricity, gas, etc.

Probably not a good comparison.

[Brian_K_White]

Gas is not a subscription. It's a recurring consumable, but when you buy a gallon of gas, or a cheeseburger, you bought an object and you own that object. You didn't rent the momentary use of it. Electricity has only a token subscription component.

The subscription aspect of a house is the property tax, which does blur the definition of ownership when it comes to land, if the government always has the ultimate claim.

Still they are perfectly apt comparisons. Consumables, even recurring ones, are not subscriptions unless you happen to subscribe to a service to provide those consumables. Even then you still actually own the delivered product and the only thing that stops when you stop paying is the service. They don't take the cheeseburger back, you just don't get a new one.

HP printers are now a subscription. They do retain control over the object and even the already-delivered ink stops working.

And it's an outrage, not reasonable. Artificially turning the seat heater in a car into a subscription is an outrage, not reasonable.

For most software, there is no reason it must be a subscription.

None of the value of updates and the treadmill of maintaining compatibility with other software, and the developer's wish to collect recurring income changes the fact that the software itself, if it functions today, can function exactly the same forever.

Maybe it will need to be run in a vm to provide an entire preserved world to go around it, maybe no one else will accept the files it produces any more after a while, and maybe you don't want to do any of that, but those are separate issues.

You could address those issues some other way like by writing a converter or something. If that's impractical, then you will surely buy new versions voluntarily, and there is no excuse for forcing you by breaking your existing things and essentially holding your life hostage all day every day.