I was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
Free software is dead? Free software is still there, same as it ever was. And it will be there forever. The more people flee to it from SAAS shittification, the better it will get.
If you take 10-15 minutes to customize the UI it can be pretty damn simple if you want. I'd say those minutes are worth it to avoid a subscription and to support a true OSS stalwart project.
Gimp, maybe not so much[1], but I understand that Krita has improved quite a bit. And regardless of stagnancy, both of these applications will continue to exist long after Affinity gets our-incredible-journeyed.
[1]: (FWIW, I don't know one way or the other. Apologies to any Gimp developers here.)
Gimp actually, finally had their big 3.0 update earlier this year which "modernized" (to ~5 years ago) a lot of the codebase. The UI is mostly the same but it's using much more modern UI components (editing text isn't terrible now, etc.)
Gimp's problem is mostly one of funding and attention, like most OSS projects. But it's never stopped development, which I think is impressive 27 years on.
Imagine where Gimp would be if any company treated it like Valve treats WINE.
I think it's annoying and patronizing. When exporting, I have to use the file browser to pick a directory and filename to save, when all I want to do is overwrite the file I have open.
It's a one-time thing per file while Gimp is open. Subsequent exports can be triggered instantly with Ctrl+E or File -> Export (instead of Export As...)
This seems fatalist. Free software isn't dead, and indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model.
In the 1980s, buying a new computer often meant buying compatible copies of software you already owned. It was a treadmill of support that did keep computing alive, but also prevented ordinary people from investing into the hobby as fully as they liked. Many of the boutique developers from the 80s would go out of business in the 1990s, when home computing proliferated to the point that they couldn't profit. Both FOSS and commercial software development persisted, despite the predictions of unfathomable hellscapes by the advocates of Franklin Computer et. al.
In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting. There was a (naive) belief that spending "the cost of a cup of coffee" would contribute to the betterment of society once Apple and Mastercard had taken their cut. But it never panned out. Brand loyalty is as foolish in software as it is in hardware.
> indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model
The worst thing is that it can totally be a sustainable business model. Many software giants of today grew to their size by offering "buy to own" products through the 90s and 2000s. Lots of software can still be bought through that model, especially games, and it seems to be going pretty well for the developers.
No, it's not that this model isn't good. It's that it's not enough. For nearly any large business today, the thought of not endlessly maximizing the profit for the immediate next quarter is appalling. The world-leading analysts have done their research, and the results are in: just like you said, brand loyalty doesn't actually matter for anything, and neither does brand perception or consistency. What makes the most money is using any means imaginable to hook people into a recurring payment, so that's what everyone will do once they get big enough. Nothing else actually matters in terms of money.
If the competition is making more money on subscriptions, they can hire more people to improve the product, ultimately beating the non subscription options.
> And lots of game companies keep going bust or get bought out by the bigger ones.
I'm not sure I'm seeing the same. The gaming industry is going strong, and increasing consolidation isn't really a sign that the companies being acquired are in financial trouble, it's more about the strength and dominance of the biggest companies. And even those biggest players are continuing to release non-subscription-based titles. I'm not saying there aren't struggling gaming companies, but to me it seems that the majority are doing well for themselves, certainly there's nothing so monumental in the industry as to make me think "they're all losing money because they're not all moving to subscription services".
Square Enix also isn't really representative of the average gaming company. FFXIV seems to be their primary product in general, especially in the American and European markets. The products they cite in other sub-segments of digital entertainment are far more niche and many don't seem to be as well-received critically. They also focus a lot more on Japan than other gaming companies, for obvious reasons, which makes direct comparisons even harder. FFXIV is definitely their main cash cow due to the situation that company is in, but there's not nearly enough to map it to some sweeping industry-wide conclusion.
> In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting.
I don't know anybody who found paying a monthly fee exicing. On the other hand, I know people who found $10 for a novelty app perfectly reasonable. But these people to my knowledge have not changed in their stances here. In other words: I see no change in customer sentiment.
yeah I liked it too but then, I realize how little I pay for this type of software vs how much I pay for subscription for services that I honestly barely use.
financially, subscriptions just make more sense sadly. People vote with their wallets, and they vote subscription.
It's sad, I loooooved Affinity and their licensing schemes, but honestly... I can see why they are moving.
The AI stuff though makes no sense to me? How many people will actually use it? But then I am mostly programmer and I use these tools only time to time.
Just like real votes, candidates will collude on issues that are bad for them, and push the discussion on trivial and/or bikesheddy issues people shouldn't really care about, keeping important arguments out of the public place.
To people who ever felt their vote were almost useless and not voting would also only make the situation worse...that's exactly how "voting with one's wallet" feel like.
Yes, not literally, but after Microsoft bought GitHub and corrupted open source, the meaning of Free Software actually became doing free labor for internet companies and not making tools for humans. Maybe the software is free, but it is only made to create a service and be gatekept rather than exactly making things like Firefox and GIMP and the good old offline days of the past where you had, in a sense, a sort of digital sovereignty. I no longer feel the same in a LUG or community. Maybe that is me, but I just don’t feel Free Software has won; I feel big corporations won in redirecting the labor of Free Software into making paid services. If GNU had won, we would have had an OS X–grade operating system with amazing apps, and yet I don’t find any advancement even in Linux, which is the half-successful dream of GNU. Ubuntu and Firefox failed in making human-centric phones; Ubuntu even failed at making an operating system for people. It’s now advertised as server and IoT, and even Fedora and friends.
It's not the same. As I said I'm okay with buying the next version every now and then—which makes the same price mostly—what I am not happy about is that my "tools" are becoming "services". There is a different feeling of buying a hammer, and going to a shop and paying them to use their hammer each time. The pricing is the same, but I can no longer just open up my offline Affinity and do what I want to, now it has to connect to the internet and take many seconds each time to "verify my license". The feeling ruins it. This knowledge that everything is a service and anyone can flip the switch and ruin your whole workflow like a pizza shop is not good, one has to be able to make their own pizza even if the shops felt like closing. A creative tool must not be a service, it has to be like your kitchen, your own.
Okay so you wanted a different kind of subscription (based on major versions). That’s different from the guy I’m replying to who wants to Buy Software And Just Use It. He can do that with v2. Never needs to pay a penny again.
All right, well you've got it. There's just no corresponding new version. Just like there are no more albums by Prince. I suppose you were lamenting there were no more songs by Prince, which is fair. I, too, feel that void.
Except for the odd fact that now you've got the software without having to pay.
Cue the old adage that if you're not paying for something you're the product not the customer...
Though in this case the biggest danger is being the training material creator used to train its models for its paid generative AI offering. I would assume people are monitoring the privacy policy and terms of use to know when such a change would happen - if it isn't so already, I haven't checked those documents.
As for me I'm happy to stick with v2 for as long as it can function on computers I own and use.
