It used to be buy the product , keep it and get bug fixes for 3 years. Upgrades would be introduced every couple of years, and users could get the upgrade at a discount, same as there were competitive discounts if you sent in the title page from the competitors user manual.
What you bought didn't stop working (heck, dBASE still runs fine in DOSbox if I feel nostalgic). Same with games (SimCity 2k in DOSbox let me finish it and yes, your city launches into space).
Well, you certainly managed to hit a nerve. Several times a month I actually run an ancient dBase II application on DOS. It's the back-end of a database app that I've never ported, though the primary front-end is PERL/CGI accessed via JavaScript... Crufty old stuff but I can't get up the incentive to rewrite it one more time in a properly integrated way.
By the way, I never could get dBase II to run in DOSbox or any other emulator. It apparently needs a physical hard disk with the old FCBs. Therefore one of
File Control Blocks. Ouch, now I feel old. But it's funny how those old programs did the job, no fancy graphics (though there were adding for displaying.tif files). The simplicity let you concentrate on the job. I like text UIs. mc idea Linux, quickedit and multiedit and telix in dos, pc tools... clipper and the clipper toolkit - speed demons compared to software running in a web browser .
Everybody wins solution (Score:0)
Here's a reasonable compromise that doesn't screw all customers out of rights, so naturally it almost never gets adopted:
Buy once = get the product
Want updates? Support? = Pay as you go. Stop paying? You get to keep the product to the point where you stopped paying.
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
It used to be buy the product , keep it and get bug fixes for 3 years. Upgrades would be introduced every couple of years, and users could get the upgrade at a discount, same as there were competitive discounts if you sent in the title page from the competitors user manual.
What you bought didn't stop working (heck, dBASE still runs fine in DOSbox if I feel nostalgic). Same with games (SimCity 2k in DOSbox let me finish it and yes, your city launches into space).
Would you buy a solitaire game as a servi
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you certainly managed to hit a nerve. Several times a month I actually run an ancient dBase II application on DOS. It's the back-end of a database app that I've never ported, though the primary front-end is PERL/CGI accessed via JavaScript... Crufty old stuff but I can't get up the incentive to rewrite it one more time in a properly integrated way.
By the way, I never could get dBase II to run in DOSbox or any other emulator. It apparently needs a physical hard disk with the old FCBs. Therefore one of
Re:Everybody wins solution (Score:2)