Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

A cracked version of W10LTSB with most of the cruft stripped out and updates/AV disabled is genuinely the best base computing experience. My WWAN card even works properly. Linux is happy inside a VM, and the host computer works properly without spending a billion hours recompiling drivers with every kind of weird lab hardware, GPUs, FPGAs, and it's own internals etc. If something is better supported on Linux I just pipe it into the VM.

I agree with your original post. Very thoughtful. The subscription version of glasses is contact lenses. Plus, most people need a tweak to their vision prescription every year (or two), so they need to update lenses.

It's both isn't it? Subscription plus perpetual fallback?

What I hate the most about subscriptions is that if the provider gets big enough, their practices degenerate to what the telecom industry is doing.

Trying to unsubscribe? Here's a long and convoluted process to do that, which might not work, so you'll end up paying for a few months more. Unhappy about that? Go ahead and sue us for those €50 you lost. We're breaking the law by doing this? Seriously, do it. We have lawyers.

Also: Here's your updated contract(and updated pricing) into which we shanghaied you because you didn't say no. Naturally there's an early cancellation fee which is too high to be worth it.

I remember having to set the limit on my card to almost zero so that I wouldn't be charged for a service I cancelled via snail mail, because that was the only way to do it. I kept getting notifications about failed payments until my card expired.

Hilariously enough a year later when I asked the person in this provider's booth if I had any outstanding payments she said there was only the cancellation fee of €25.

Had I not set the limit my card would have been charged with payments that weren't even in the system.

These are mostly non-sequiturs, with some plausible cases.

For example - I don't think subscription licensing for media is moral, and I think legally it's a rife place for some serious case law.

Simple example - Recording shows for personal consumption (time shifting) is absolutely allowed under current copyright law. If I subscribe to netflix for a month and record every show I want to watch to my personal NAS... I'm not breaking the law at all. I'll then happily stop paying the subscription after a month. Moral? Probably not. Legal? Sure.

But... what if I really do want a moral way to consume netflix content at a later date for a non-recurring, non-changed-at-their-whim cost? Well - sucks to be me because there's literally no way to buy it. I think that's also fairly immoral. I'm literally being held captive to a subscription for eternity, with no way to negotiate the deal, and the real loss of any catalogue item at any time with no recourse. Moral? Fuck no. Legal? Sure.

So... Where is the middle ground? Because I'd really, desperately like to see a better middle ground. Where I don't have to feel like a thief, and also don't feel like I'm getting extorted to watch some shows.

This mostly also holds for many saas companies. It's especially obvious in cases where the product used to be a stand-alone binary that I could install, but is now a packaged saas product, that's arguably worse (adobe photoshop comes to mind - but lots of companies are moving this direction).

I used to be willing to enter a deal where I got a static item in exchange for a fixed cost - but the new deal is... I get ephemeral products that change price/features/capabilities at any moment and with zero recourse.

And companies aren't doing this because it benefits the users - they're doing it because it's LITERAL rent seeking behavior. They know that profits are higher with this strategy.

So again - is stealing it moral? I would say no. But I don't think that in any way invalidates that the subscription model is hands down abusive to customers. Personally I've moved to self-hosted and open source everywhere I can.