The worst case scenario is they’ll discontinue the product or replace it with something incompatible, making it so you can never open your old work again under the software it was created with. The best case scenario is you’ll have to pay whatever price they ask for. You may loose the ability to open your own projects in the future without their say so. I do agree that software subscriptions are bad for owner rights and control and it’s draconian for creative apps in particular. Practically every FOSS editor is better than notepad, haha. Filezilla, blender, wireshark, chromium, firefox, git, etc. There’s lots of FOSS software I’d be using even on windows. Sometimes FOSS software is inferior, but I wouldn’t say always. …aaand I just realised I have become the person I made fun of about 10 yers ago. Yes, a subscription for a local tool! Eventually, I settled for gitg despite being inferior, at least it’s FOSS and will keep working forever (I don’t want to be tied to a particular IDE). I even had this problem at work recently, where the last free version of GitKraken was made non-operational by the vendor, and the paid version comes with a subscription. I have to say that as a technology enthusiast, the outlook appears pretty bleak: Software that is either subscription-only or inferior FOSS software.

Why does software that doesn’t have any significant infrastructure costs on the part of the vendor comes as subscription-only? Where does this end? Will your fridge come with a subscription for the software and if you don’t pay it will stop working?Īnd the sad thing is that, even if the EU makes it so that software without any significant infrastructure costs has to be made available as a perpetual license, the vendor can always go the Adobe route of throwing in a mediocre cloud storage service in the package to “justify” the subscription model.

Filezilla pro price