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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

A subscription model also flips ownership. You're only ever renting and the owner can take it back at any time (often at their discretion).

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Jetbrain's model is a good middle ground - you get perpetual access to versions released while your sub was active.

This was the “old” subscription model for desktop software. It’s the model most software with yearly updates was sold under (MS Office, Jira, etc, etc) and was basically a yearly subscription (to get access to new versions) except that it guaranteed the developer would be creating yearly releases to make it worth adopting newer versions, while the “current” subscription model doesn’t particularly encourage a company to continue innovating and developing to ensure their products don’t stagnate. The only problem with the old “yearly release w/ lifetime per-version” licensing is that it didn’t encourage refactoring, under-the-hood improvements, etc and encouraged needless churn with UI, etc as “progress for the sake of progress” to make it more appealing to upgrade on a yearly basis.

Yep, I’ve served my years as a dev under that model too :)

Correction: You get perpetual access to the oldest version released during your 1 year subscription period.

My JB subscriptions expire at the end of this month, if I don't re-up, I have to downgrade to 2020.1 versions and forego all the improvements and bugfixes in 2020.2 and 2020.3 (2020.3 is the latest release, which I'm currently using).

Thanks, I didn’t realise that. They say you get 2020.2.x releases, so you’d hope fixes for show stopping bugs would be back ported. Probably nothing smaller though, which is a shame.

It's such a weird system. The common logic for subscriptions is that you are paying for ongoing maintenance and updates (which is absolutely fair vs a one-off purchase). But if my active subscription helped fund those improvements, I think I should be entitled to continue using them after my sub expires.

It's a good thing their products are top notch.

I guess they do it to discourage on/off subscriptions, which I get. Would be better if they gave a bonus for unbroken subscription instead.

The ownership relationship doesn't change. Non- subscription licenses can be revoked/terminated too.

How?

Through legal means.

That seems very rare/special case and unlikely. Also it doesn't seem like it would hold water in court.

Qt is also licensed via LGPL

But for how much longer will new versions be released? Since they own all copyrights to the software, it's relatively easy to drop LGPL at any point on newer releases.

Sure, if they don’t mind Qt automatically being relicensing under BSD

“The little known KDE Free Qt Foundation makes sure that Qt stays free and open-source. It guarantees that all Qt modules currently licensed under LGPLv3 must continue to be available under LGPLv3 in the future. This covers all modules from Qt Essentials and many add-on modules. If The Qt Company discontinued the FOSS version of Qt, the Foundation would have the right to make Qt available under the BSD license. This is a very powerful protection of free and open-source Qt.“

https://www.embeddeduse.com/2019/12/21/safe-guarding-the-lgp...

https://dot.kde.org/2016/01/13/qt-guaranteed-stay-free-and-o...

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