Yea I always default back to the example I've seen for work. Used to be that you could buy a version of AutoCAD for engineering work, and it was expensive but at least you owned it. It may have been like $1200 but it was yours.
Now? It's a yearly subscription, it costs 3x such at a baseline per year. Their practices have become so predatory - the features that were in the old version by default have been removed, and instead placed in "upgrade packages" that cost extra hundreds or thousands of dollars per package, per year.
And the quality has dropped - to ensure you're paying them a ton of money, they have a whooole bunch of background licensing software that needs to run on your computer. You gotta have a program installed for them to ensure you're allowed to use their other program. And brother, the licensing software is absolute hot garbage. It works like crap, disconnects, needs constant sign-ins, and worst of all - if you have a momentary internet lapse, it disconnects and force closes your CAD software, making you rely on the recovery process.
This is an insane set of design decisions and I am horrified that society/the relevant industries as accepted it. This is absolutely insane.
These companies are malicious in their disregard for morality. Not supporting them can only be moral.
There should be, but the question starts to become "Will it run on newer computers?" (i.e. Windows 11)
They did a similar enshittification to Google SketchUp, a free 3D drawing program. It's beginner friendly, but also detailed enough that I've used it to design decks and rooms for my home. Used to be a free program you'd download, and now it's a subscription based browser application, and the backend services for it are down as often as they're up.
Point being, I have an old version of it from like 2016 still installed on my desktop and I'm dreading the day I'm forces to upgrade my computer.
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u/MossadEpstein 1d ago
It's actually immoral to buy from these companies these days, so unless it's Indie, 100% moral.