Rental software basically puts you at the mercy of the software company. But the idea that you can write a document, but have to pay a subscription fee 10 years later if you need to access your very own content, is objectionable. Microsoft has loosened this up a bit, and other programs can now open their files (albeit with imperfect formatting results). Traditionally they save your document in a proprietary format. Word processing programs are another example. It would be as if you had purchased a bunch of music and could only play it with iTunes, and one day Apple decided it would start charging you $10/month to access your own (purchased and downloaded) music, or worse, went out of business or decided to stop your access for whatever reason. (This just happened to my wife, so it isn't an abstraction). But some of these are moving to a subscription model (End Note, Sente), and worse, if they go belly-up (like Sente), your lifetime-accumulated library of references is locked into a proprietary format and is inaccessible. In a sense it works a lot like iTunes, and some of these are even built from the same code base. Academics often use reference-management software to handle journal articles. In the case of proprietary rental software, especially where the user creates content, it crosses the line into ransom-ware. So in principle this should be no different from renting a car or chain saw, because you only pay for the period in which you use it, and there is no reason why, if next Tuesday, you are denied access to the rental car or chain-saw, that would impact your prior investment. In the case of software, you are paying for a limited period of use. Really what Netflix is selling is subscription access to their library.) (It is also true of subscriptions to Netflix, but there really isn't any expectation that the material should be available in perpituity. But this is true for any on-line subscription to newspapers, journals, magazines, etc. In the case of scientific journals, if the fee goes up too high, or the journal goes out of business, etc., the library has no hard-copy of the journal to show for its investment, and more importantly, access to published information is curtailed. On-line subscriptions become more problematic (ask your librarian and you will likely get an earful) because you are paying for access. If you terminate your subscription, you still own those magazines and newspapers you received. Traditional subscriptions to magazines and newspapers make sense, because the consumer is receiving a tangible item that is produced periodically. Just curious to read all the perspectives. ![]() ![]() Can you tell a bit more about why you hate it.
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