Proprietary Subscription Software: was Photoshop

On Tue, 2022-08-30 at 08:56 -0700, JD Austin via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> Adobe doesn't sell CS6 anymore; they're all about the subscription.
>

What's really cool about the proprietary subscription model is that once you're not
subscribed, you've lost your data. Who wouldn't enjoy a situation like that?

I don't want any of you to think I'm trying to get sympathy, but in 1990 I started
using a spectacular drawing program called Micorgrafx Windows Draw (MGX Draw), and
made hundreds of drawings with it. In the late 1990's MGX Draw was sold to a company
operating out of a PO box, who promptly sunk it but wouldn't release the source.
Unfortunately for me, I still had the install disk, so even today I have the option
of running MGX Draw on Wine in order to access my drawings from the 1990's. Totally
unacceptable. WordPerfect 5.1 is worse: Being a DOS program all I need to do is copy
the WordPerfect 5.1 install directory to my Linux drive, run it under FreeDOS, and
access all my 1980's Wordperfect files. This is a horrible invasion of the past.

When it came to an outline processor called Grandview, I solved this problem even
though Grandview wasn't a subscription. I lost the install CD and the executable
tree, so now I cannot look at my Grandview files at all. This is how computing
should work: Data over 7 years old must be discarded!

Subscription software solves this problem elegantly. Imagine your joy when you go to
open an old file, only to find that you no longer have an executable with which to
look at the file. Then you might as well no longer back it up, keeping your backups
smaller.

I just love proprietary subscription software!

SteveT



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