[ghaff]

So, in other words, you need to upgrade--or have a subscription. In fact, extended support agreements for some enterprise products are a premium offering that don't require moving up to the next version given the effort associated with backporting bug fixes for a fairly small base.

[AlbertCory]

I'm not sure how that's implied, but: paying a subscription for them to fix bugs and keep up with all the churn under them seems reasonable to me.

[ghaff]

And enterprise companies often do that. But that's different from pay once and you're done forever which was the original comment.

[AlbertCory]

I went quite a ways up the parent chain without seeing anyone seriously proposing that. All executables become unusable eventually (except maybe for IBM mainframes), so "pay once and you're done forever" is inherently impossible.

Unless you keep running every part of the hardware / software stack, which works only until some piece of hardware wears out.

[ghaff]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208053

exe34 15 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

> $495 per application. it was a lifetime licence though. you can probably still run it today.

Also:

that's where we disagree: you don't usually need to stay current. as long as it does the job, it's current enough. if there's new features available that would add value to the business, then you have a business case to buy a new license. 95% of software update haven't really added any value since the early 00s.

-----

Maybe I misinterpreted but the implication is I could run something from the early 00s without changes which--while true in some cases--I wouldn't do in general.

[AlbertCory]

> Maybe I misinterpreted but the implication is I could run something from the early 00s without changes

Yes, you did. If he meant that, he wasn't thinking. Some piece of your hardware won't work with the old software, unless it's also old. You get a new printer and there are no drivers for the old OS. The old software won't work with the new network. You want some new app and it doesn't work with the old software. Etc. Etc.

We ran into this in Google Patent Litigation all the time. You have to have old everything to run old software, whether your license is still good or not.

But I think we agree that paying for maintenance only, and no new features, is fair. Of course, most vendors don't want to do that; they want to shove new "features" down your throat.

[ghaff]

When I worked for an enterprise Linux vendor, we definitely provided long-term support/maintenance options followed by security patches. It was mostly for government-related but also for some companies, especially those that were using it for embedded applications. But we also had meetings with those customers regularly who certainly weren't just installing the software and not touching it for 10+ years.

I've also known customers who have old software, e.g. for test systems, just running on old systems who basically don't breathe on the ancient systems. For years, United's entertainment system would also sometimes reboot to a 20+ year-old pre-Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel but that's not really a critical system.

[exe34]

have you guys never heard of virtualisation, wine, etc?