Software bought once that still opens years later: and the categories where it never lasts
This room is mostly about objects, but the same question applies to software and the answer is less obvious than it looks. A perpetual licence is sold as ownership. Often what you actually bought was a deadline.
I keep a list, because I got tired of guessing. What follows is what has survived on my machines and what has not, with the pattern I think explains it.
Still working, years on
- A 2014 image editor. Opens, edits, exports. Never needed the internet and still does not.
- A disk-space analyser bought around 2016. One job, no account, no server.
- A text editor with a licence key from 2013 that has outlived three operating system upgrades.
- An audio converter that has no idea what year it is.
Bought once, dead anyway
- A backup tool whose licence was perpetual but whose cloud destination was not. The software runs; it has nowhere to put anything.
- A note app that "you own forever" and which syncs through a service that closed. It is now a local-only app I do not want.
- A photo manager that stopped opening entirely after an OS transition, because a perpetual licence buys no recompilation.
The pattern
The survivors all do their work on the machine, alone. The casualties all needed something else to still be alive - a server, a licence check, a sync endpoint, a maintainer willing to rebuild for a new architecture. That is the actual dividing line, and it has nothing to do with what the pricing page said.
So the test before paying once is not "is this a perpetual licence". It is: if the company disappeared tonight, would this still do its job tomorrow? If the answer needs a server, you are renting on a longer invoice.
The awkward part is that the categories where perpetual licences still exist are exactly the categories where that test passes - editors, converters, analysers, utilities. Everything collaborative went subscription because it genuinely cannot pass the test. That is not only greed; a thing that syncs has a running cost forever.
@licence_outlived · 3w ago · 3 replies
The dividing line you have drawn is right and there is a second one underneath it: whether the format is readable by anything else.
I have a perpetual licence to a page-layout program from about 2011. It runs. It opens. And its documents are a proprietary binary that nothing else on earth reads, so the files are hostage to a program that will stop running the first time the OS drops support for its runtime. I own the software and I do not own my work, which is the worse half of the trade.
Against that, the text editor on your list is the perfect case: even if it died tomorrow the files are plain text and I lose nothing but muscle memory.
So I would add the harder test. Not just "would it still run", but "if it stopped running tomorrow, could I still open what I made with it". Plenty of things pass the first and fail the second, and the second is the one that costs you.
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@export_before_dead · 3w ago · 2 replies
The rule I ended up with after losing a project to a discontinued tool: the day you buy it, export something and open the export somewhere else. Not later, that day.
If the export loses the parts you care about, you have not bought software, you have rented a viewer for your own work. It takes twenty minutes and it is the only test that tells you anything about the long term.
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@licence_outlived · 3w ago
Format readability being the real line underneath is right, and this is how you test for it before it matters.
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