[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.