That sounds right, and your experience obviously gives you a negative experience of the manufacturer. But as an engineer in this situation I can relate. If we had phone-home activation I'd probably try to argue that it should be expiring re-enabled every year in the product so that if we abandoned it then users wouldn't be stranded.
The question I'd have to answer is - would this be a net positive? Would it lead to more or less sales? Would we only lose customers who wouldn't buy a new license anyway? What would the cost be of my proposed feature that helps customers in the future?
In our situation there is zero risk of e.g. losing business to open source, so management would likely be deligthted with the idea that users would not be running our old software. In reality we avoid the problem entirely by just selling subscriptions like so many others these days. The software has a kill switch that makes it unusable after the planned release date of version N+2.
The managers of this hypothetical software company would surely complain if their cars were remotely disabled because the manufacturer wanted to sell a new model. Similarly their customers should complain (via the courts) when the product they bought is remotely disabled to force them to upgrade.
As a sibling poster points out, running a license server is a trivial expense and if you require it for your product you should budget to keep it running. It's roughly $400 for a perpetuity paying $20/y to run the server indefinitely.
I completely agree - but hopefully if the management knows what they are doing in 2002 they don't sell a license that gives the buyer perpetual right to use the software (they can't guarantee that so long as the maintenance of license servers is required. Having a perpetual license is basically an infinite future expense even if the cost is trivial.)
> Having a perpetual license is basically an infinite future expense even if the cost is trivial.
It's a one-time expense if budgeted properly. Buy a perpetuity to cover it. If you ever discontinue the service you can release an unlimited copy of the software and recover the value of the perpetuity.
The question I'd have to answer is - would this be a net positive? Would it lead to more or less sales? Would we only lose customers who wouldn't buy a new license anyway? What would the cost be of my proposed feature that helps customers in the future?
In our situation there is zero risk of e.g. losing business to open source, so management would likely be deligthted with the idea that users would not be running our old software. In reality we avoid the problem entirely by just selling subscriptions like so many others these days. The software has a kill switch that makes it unusable after the planned release date of version N+2.