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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

> lifetime licenses are dishonest (e.g. company cannot work for free, so their funded is based on unlimited growth, which isn't realistic for most).

I don’t really know what you mean by “dishonest”, that seems like a slightly hyperbolic word here. If someone pays for a lifetime license the company isn’t working for free nor necessarily assuming unlimited growth, they just have to understand and correctly price the average value of their contract, and there are many established successful businesses doing exactly already. And it’s common to price the lifetime license below the predicted average total costs, because money in the bank today is more valuable than later (it’s an investment, and the money can be used as such.) If there’s something I really know I’m going to use for years, and I can get a discount by paying up front, I’m totally in favor of doing so when it’ll cost me less and support the company as well.

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I'd say it's dishonest in the sense that a company knows the probabilities are such that they can't actually ever truly support a lifetime license, so it's a lie from the start.

At the end of the day, companies usually go out of business or else sell themselves to another company within a certain number of years. And a new company (like in this case) may change their mind about lifetime licenses, because it's a totally different set of owners with different priorities. "Everybody" knows this, but company management knows it even more than consumers, hence the dishonesty.

As a rule of thumb for consumers, anything supposedly perpeutal or "lifetime" for consumers in the business world is probably not even going to last 10 years. It's effectively always a lie.

Ugh, please don’t make it worse and escalate to “lie”. You’re blaming the wrong source, and have it backwards IMO. The previous owners weren’t lying, the new owners are the ones to blame for breaking a pre-existing contract with the company. Breaking this contract might not be legal, and in that sense they may be only the ones lying.

If the previous owners were truly committed to upholding the lifetime license, they would have never sold the company without an ironclad legally enforceable guarantee the new owners would uphold the lifetime license as well.

They clearly didn't. They either didn't care, or it would have decreased the sale price of the company (or the ability to sell it at all) and they preferred the money.

So I absolutely hold the original owners equally responsible. They made the promise and they created the conditions for it to be broken. Which was an entirely predictable outcome, which is why calling it a "lie" doesn't seem inappropriate.

Why do you believe the contract with the customer isn’t legally enforceable? The new owners may just be choosing to break the law because they believe nobody will attempt to sue them over fifty bucks or whatever.

I guess you can decide to blame whoever you want, but the legal responsibility for upholding a contract lies with the company, and a change of ownership doesn’t change that from a legal perspective. It also doesn’t change or help anything to make wild assumptions about what the previous owners cared about. You simply cannot control what a new owner does with your company once you sell it, that’s what selling it means.

Using words like “lying” when people may have had every intention to meet the contract is just an exaggeratory drain on having reasonable conversation.

It is absolutely lying. The original owners could have put in a voluntary, irrevocable, liquidated damages clause that is sufficiently punitive that no subsequent owner of the company would think to violate it. As they intend to honor the “lifetime license” for a lifetime and totally do not intend to renege for that duration there is no harm in enforcing that clause with force of law.

You didn’t even consider the question I asked. Why are you making the assumption that sale of a lifetime license isn’t currently enforceable by law? The article only complained and didn’t attempt to challenge their license. Your idea only works if someone is willing to challenge the company. If the new owners of a company are choosing to break the contracts or the law, why would you expect another contract to help?

There are a million and one promises companies have made to customers and other companies by the time they are acquired. Installing clauses like you suggest for all of them is wildly unrealistic, would be very expensive in billable lawyer hours, may delay or subvert the sale, and above all may be unnecessary/unhelpful/confusing if the existing customer contract is already legally binding.

I did, in fact, consider the question you asked. The terms are enforceable by law, but the ability to enforce is so limp-wristed and ineffectual as to provide effectively no recourse with respect to getting the specific terms of the contract executed which is what unsophisticated consumers morally deserve in contracts of adhesion (or a immediate full refund).

That companies find it inconvenient for their pocketbook and deal flow to actually bind themselves in a effective way to the terms of their promises to the legally unsophisticated public is ethically repugnant. If they do no want to do so then they can just not promise or imply such terms, nothing is forcing them to make promises that they have no intention to be bound by.

> The original owners could have put in a voluntary, irrevocable, liquidated damages clause that is sufficiently punitive that no subsequent owner of the company would think to violate it

If a court believed the liquidated damages were punitive, they would reject the value specified by the contract and substitute a more reasonable estimate of the actual damages.

I am aware such a result is possible, but as far as I am aware (I am not a lawyer) punitive liquidated damages being substituted occurs due to a general legal theory of unconscionability that such terms are imposed against a weaker party and are sufficiently unfair.

That is not the case here as this is the clearly strong party, being the entity drafting the contract of adhesion, uniformly adding it to contracts where they have complete control over the terms where it harms themselves for the benefit of the weaker party. I find it highly unlikely that a clause with such facts would be struck down in existing precedent or in the future, though I could be wrong. If I am wrong, then I need to come up with a new idea.

To be fair, lifetime may refer to the life of the company and not the customer :P

Right. Sell it and somehow you have no responsibility.

That’s a bit of a straw man, why are we adding even more exaggeration?

The company has the responsibility to honor its contracts before and after a sale, legally.

The relationship sounds more complicated for the article at the top, but since this sub thread detoured into abstract generalizations, and we’re now talking about responsibility categorically, a change of ownership of a company is transparent to the company’s legal responsibilities to its customers and contracts.

And yes, that’s what a sale legally means for the previous owner, generally speaking. They are transferring all control, profits, obligations, and debts to the new owner. It would be bad if that weren’t the case, because then company owners could weasel out of the company obligations by blaming someone else who no longer has any control.

I don't think it's that anyone is lying as much as the concept of "lifetime licenses" is itself a lie. There is no such thing, as proven by all the various ways that such licenses have been voided.

> There is no such thing

Sure there is, there’s an entire thread here of people mentioning their faves.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35538466

It’s not proof or even true to claim that some examples mean all lifetime licenses will be voided. Like most things in life, it’s a distribution where some people behave well and some people don’t.

It’s valid to worry about whether a lifetime license will survive the future, whether you think any specific company is lying to you, and it’s worth estimating the risks of your purchase. But it’s not valid to conclude that the whole concept of this kind of license is a lie just because it doesn’t always work out.

The very fact that it's possible for it to not work out makes it a deceptive term because it's not a "lifetime license".

If you actually buy software, there is no possibility that the company can take it away from you.

> The very fact that it's possible for it to not work out makes it a deceptive term because it's not a "lifetime license".

Naw, by that logic any sale of any kind is “deceptive”. You’re conflating sometimes with always. The existence of dishonest people doesn’t make you a dishonest person, right?

> by that logic any sale of any kind is “deceptive”.

How so? Nobody is going to repossess something I've actually purchased. That's the whole point of a purchase.

A "lifetime license" is not like that.

> Naw, by that logic any sale of any kind is “deceptive”.

It is not possible for the late-night Mexican drive-through joint (which I am about to patronize) to force me to "un-eat" the bacon breakfast burrito, chicken torta, and large horchata I have ordered and am prepared to consume.

> The existence of dishonest people doesn’t make you a dishonest person, right?

If I'm engaging in a behavior which dishonest people typically do and honest people typically don't, then it's entirely reasonable to scrutinize whether I'm being honest.

I agree. The only time a lifetime license will actually be honored as such is of the company’s product fails and it’s no longer around as a company, so it allows you to continue using the current version as is.

When companies that have offered lifetime licenses don’t fail, they inevitably kill the lifetime part of the license by pulling different tricks like, creating a cloud version which now becomes their future version, while the desktop version is no longer maintained, or rebranding the same app as a new app where actual development continues while the old app gets minimal updates at most, or not updating the app with the lifetime license so it works on modern OSes and platforms.

If you’re lucky, you may have snagged a lifetime license the company offered early in its life, which it then stopped offering once it started getting successful, so it continues letting you use the lifetime license because the owners of such licenses are few enough that any marginal revenue they may earn by pulling the above tricks is not worth the reputational damage.

> The only time a lifetime license will actually be honored as such is of the company’s product fails and it’s no longer around as a company, so it allows you to continue using the current version as is.

You could also sell mission-critical software with a lifetime license. It just has to be bad enough that it can outlive the user.

I'm of the advice that lifetime licenses are only sustainable if they're sold as a way to attract early users, as a way to reward their faith into a product that had chances to fail and see their money gone forever. It shouldn't be a type of license that keeps getting sold once the product has matured and has some brand recognition in order to make it sustainable.

If the product can run standalone on the client's computer, make it a license for that specific major version, and sell the upgrade to the next major versions for a fraction of the price. Those who wants the latest features can buy the upgrade and sustain the business, and those who are happy with the current version can keep using their version without feeling wronged.

You definitely could support a lifetime license if some of the money is invested and used to pay for the upkeep of each license. It is about pricing the model correctly.

I don't think I agree with the "dishonest" label, but lifetime licenses are a bit scammy even when they're offered earnestly.

Could you elaborate? My Plex lifetime license has been very valuable to me and has already saved me money.

Because it's not clear what "lifetime" means. In practice what it means is "until the company is sold" or restructured or whatever.

But the implication is that it's for your lifetime.

How does your lifetime license save you money over just engaging in a straight-up purchase?

It's very clear what it means, it means the lifetime of how long you think this product is going to last. It's a decision as a consumer you make.

When I purchased the Plex lifetime license 6 years ago, I asked myself how many years to break even vs if I purchased yearly. The answer was 2.5 years.

I also asked myself if Plex was going to last at least that long, and I thought they were, and they did, and I wanted to support them.

FWIW, I regret not buying a lifetime Plex license. I am still paying every year.

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