It’s not just the case of badly written software. It will work until they shut off the license servers.
Adobe CS2 is a highly-capable software suite that would happily run on today’s computers. I remember when Adobe shut down the license servers for CS2. They released a version that you didn’t need to activate to assure people that they would still be able to use the software they bought in the future. But then they got tired of hosting the download servers, so they stopped, and that was it.
You answered your own question. Buying a perpetual license ensures the company can’t rug pull you. Not having the option for a perpetual license gives no guarantees of the sort. One of Serif’s top selling points was the perpetual license, and people were rightfully nervous about the Canva acquisition. They even made it a huge point in their announcement to reassure people who were nervous about the perpetual license model going away.
A perpetual license does not entitle me to anything beyond the scope of the license, of course. It’s great that I can use V2 for as long as it serves my needs. But now, when someone new is looking for graphic design software, or if I find am missing some good features in V1 or V2 that get added to the new software, of course I will be upset that I no longer have the option to upgrade to or recommend the non-rug-pullable option.
I feel like it’s not unreasonable to have a negative opinion towards the decisions companies make that further the enshittification of the professional software world.
It's absolutely reasonable to criticize the decision and feel like you're losing an option in the future. I guess I would expect this to scan more as disappointment, rather than anger or the sense of being 'ripped off' which some people were expressing.
But these days I use (the free version of) Figma for a lot of what I would have used Affinity for, so I am surely not as sensitive to this change as people who use their tools every day.
I also wonder if the paradigm shift to SaaS has caused us to have more forward-looking perspectives about software in general (rather than focusing on what exists today).
Adobe CS2 is a highly-capable software suite that would happily run on today’s computers. I remember when Adobe shut down the license servers for CS2. They released a version that you didn’t need to activate to assure people that they would still be able to use the software they bought in the future. But then they got tired of hosting the download servers, so they stopped, and that was it.