this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
25 points (60.5% liked)
Lemmy
2172 readers
2 users here now
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Something has gone wrong in software development where software can never be finished.
If you release an app on Google Play and never touch it again, eventually Google will pull it from the store and customers will complain that it no longer runs on new devices. Android 16 will require that all applications now do something, and refuse to run any that do not.
This is the real structural source of the constant subscription demands. Nobody is willing to commit to supporting a stable API for 10 or 20 years, and nobody will keep coming in to bump dependency versions and rewrite systems to Google or Apple's new whims every year unless they get paid for this apparently useless work.
I think it started when software stopped being distributed physically. It's hard to push a bunch of updates to your users when they've need to physically have floppies sent to them versus doing it over the network.
I remember a time when software being "Gold Master" meant it was literally written to a gold master disk, from which copies were made. With that kind of release you had to make damn sure things were finished.
The difference is that software nowadays is interconnected. Sync doesn't exist on its own, nor does Lemmy. And if one of these links changes, chances are, that something else needs to change to keep up. You're talking about standalone software that that exists entirely on its own. But that's not what this post is about.