Introducing ONCE, a new line of software products from 37signals: Pay one time, own forever.
Introducing ONCE, a new line of software products from 37signals: Pay one time, own forever.
Once upon a time you owned what you paid for, you controlled what you depended on, and your privacy and security were your own business. We think it’s that time again.
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I mean, I get it, but there's value in paying for support and updates, and it's untenable for an organization to do that for free. I'm optimistic for software running under this model, I'd 1000% love to go back to the pay once per major version model, but "pay once forever" software leaves some unanswered questions.
First question: the fuck are they actually making? They’re so vague about everything except how to pay.
They'll tell you after you pay them
Typical DHH bullshit. He likes to be contrarian but he never actually follows through.
He’s a little bitch and both Ruby on Rails and the world endurance championship would be better off without him.
Woah woah woah back the fuck up what about WEC?
DHH is a driver for JOTA in LMP2, he was originally a gentleman driver in pro-am like your typical rich tech guy
Oh, I never paid attention to P2. They’re like the awkward middle child between the two classes I actually cared about.
I mean, this is signed by Jason Fried, but I get your point.
Right. I have boxes full of software I bought once, and I have the license to use it forever. But it's for Windows XP or older. I'd need emulators or WINE to run it now, and it's not really worth it. For some of it I even paid for a "lifetime" of updates, but that stops working out when they stop updating it. I apparently live a lot longer than 90s and 2000s software companies. Just let me pay for major versions again with a guarantee of updates for X years, and price it according to those expectations.
37Signals is the company that made Basecamp, and they talk about hosting the software yourself, so presumably they are writing web software that would often be SaaS and letting you host it. So it's great that you'll be able to get it for one time purchase. But it definitely needs updates, as libraries change versions, new security flaws are uncovered, obviously for bugs, etc. Buying web application software is only as useful as the length of the updates included. Them providing the source is better, but since that's not open source exactly a community couldn't really work together to continue updates themselves.
I apparently live a lot longer than 90s and 2000s software companies.
In business lingo, that makes you an immortal.
I think there were probably times where software that got shipped actually worked. So you bought it and you could use it, no need for "maintenance". I generally don't think that's the right word since software doesn't decay on its own, so there's nothing to "maintain" actively. Apart from compatibility of course, but if that breaks (e.g. with newer OS or hardware), it would make sense to pay for an update if you need it. Makes a lot more sense than those disgusting subscription scams that adobe is pulling off (and every other company seems to follow).
There were still bugs. You just learned how to deal with them or work around them.