[LoganCale]

As a user of the software, I don't much care about the successes of the developers if they come at the cost of the tools I've invested time into switching to.

Sure, this may be a great deal for the developers, and that's fine and good. But that doesn't change the fact that it still harms everyone they convinced to switch to their product. They could have done like Sofa and transferred ownership of the existing products to another developer, or open sourced it to allow others to pick up where they left off. If they had done that, I would've still had a bit of respect for them. Killing development entirely on a product used and loved by many is stupid and, while within their moral rights, a bit of a dick move.

[emeltzer]

"I don't much care about the successes of the developers if they come at the cost of the tools I've invested time switching into"

It's a bit silly to say that you don't care about their interests, if they come at the expense of your interests, but you think that them having what is arguably a milder version of that same attitude (i.e. that they value their own financial interests over your time invested in their product) is a "dick move".

[ricardobeat]

How is that silly? It goes both ways. As a developer you might not care about the happiness of users if they are using your software without a license. In this case they valued their own interests in spite of the users' commitment. A dick move in my book.

[res0nat0r]

A dick move is thinking the developers should be indebted to you for life for giving them them a one time payment of money which is less than a couple of rounds of beers.

[mgunes]

I just addressed this in a comment on another submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4276668

People aren't throwing their arms up because they lost ten dollars; they're doing so because a piece of software that was important in their daily work, and that they enjoyed using and cared about, and probably would have happily continued to pay for, isn't going to be around in a short while.

Too bad for them; perhaps they should have evaluated the consequences of tying up a piece of their workflow as critical as email to a ten-dollar proprietary app made by people without a track record of building sustainable software better.

The real dick move is to tease people with cool technologies, good design, so-called new marketing models like fenced-garden app stores where "the little guy can make a buck too", lure them in with a cheap and tasty bait, and then use it to make a fortune for a few people at the expense of tens of thousands. That's what a good portion of the software industry is doing, and in the long run, it isn't going to pay out. After a period of bitter lessons, people will stop buying your shiny apps that go away after a few months for critical tasks, stop giving you all their data for cool free services that may ruin their professional lives, and stick to solutions that respect their intelligence. The app store industry will be left selling games and fart apps.

[LoganCale]

Exactly this. The financial investment is not the issue here, it's the investment of time and mental energy into integrating the tool into my workflow and becoming dependent on it. I do not expect them to develop new features indefinitely for free, but I would like it to continue to be supported and developed, even if that means a new paid release every year or so. I'd gladly continue paying for new major releases.

As it is, we'll probably get a compatibility release for anything that may break with the next OS update and not much beyond that. Come several years from now and it may simply not work anymore because of an OS change. That's my primary concern. Being abandonware with an unspecified, vague promise of critical fixes makes it seem questionable whether there's any value in continuing to use it vs. investing time in switching to another tool (of which there are few to none which work perfectly for my particular workflow) up front before it does inevitably stop working down the road.

[AndrewDucker]

The software will still be around. It just won't be improved.

[mgunes]

The developers haven't specified a support and maintenance period, and unmaintained software being "around" isn't a good thing. See my other comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4276988

[jasonlotito]

You are saying that as if they couldn't charge for upgrades.

[Kerrick]

The thing is, you're not losing your email client. You paid for Sparrow, the email client, as it was at a given point. If you were happy with your purchase a week ago, you should still be happy with your purchase. You still have the same email client you paid for, you weren't paying for future features.

This acquisition does not mean they're pulling your license to use the application, it does not mean they're disabling or hobbling the application, it simply means they aren't developing more features for it--only bug fixes and maintenance.

[azza-bazoo]

> You still have the same email client you paid for, you weren't paying for future features.

Although I agree, if you look through the other Sparrow threads there's a strong theme of "I paid with the expectation of future improvements". And that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, given how quickly they'd shipped improvements before.

It feels like there's some larger argument here around what exactly you're buying when you pay for software. After all, many small vendors say things like "pay us so we can continue our work", which certainly suggests you'll be getting more in future.

[mgunes]

They aren't specifying the period for which they will be providing bug fixes and maintenance. Which means the software has an unknown (and judging by similar cases, probably very small) amount usable life left.

As opposed to how the app store paradigm of low-cost one-time purchases has lay people believe, software is radically different from most shelf-sold commodities they are used to buying in stores, in that it is destined to become less useful with time, to rot, if not cared for. Unmaintained software is prone to security vulnerabilities, gets harder to document and understand, and eventually becomes unusable on modern hardware. That "you're not losing your email client" is only true for today; having a working binary today doesn't guarantee you'll have a secure, working tool a few weeks/months down the line.

If the app store industry is intent on continuing to sell software as minimally critical to people's productivity as email software, they are going to have to come up with a persuasive, standardized, binding method of informing people of terms of support, and learn to stick to the terms they have set. App stores and their respective platforms are only a few years old; give it some time and people are going to collectively get much wiser than to tie their critical workflows and data to opportunistic pieces of technology built by bright young people whose top incentive is to make a fast buck and/or pose as "indies" to get employed by the status quo.