Yes, you may know what you really want (but not always) andreally need (not nearly so often the case). You are the guy with the money, and you are the guy who makes the decisions, and none of this guarantees that you are not about to make a totally stupid decision, or one that is severely lacking, or one that could be much better if you would listen to the professional in the area instead of fighting him.
This coming from the guy who regularly rants about having to stop using decades-old software because somebody else decided, in their vast wisdom, that something newer is better.
None of us is perfect, and none of us is perfectly consistent, and we are all driven more than we like to admit by emotional responses to frustration and pressure when we respond to others. That includes me.
Still, I continue to refuse to accept the notion that software is a service that the service provider is allowed to change without my permission, and then stand there with a mercenary smirk and tell me I will really be better off if I buy his latest and greatest, even if his latest and greatest is slower, or harder to use, or less reliable than what I had before.
I buy a hammer. It works great for pounding nails. Somebody invents a jackhammer. I don't need a jackhammer to pound nails. If I find I need a jackhammer, I will buy a jackhammer, separately.
The guy who invented the jackhammer has no right to break my hammer and force me to buy a jackhammer, even if the jackhammer, and subtle variations on it, is the only thing he is capable of inventing for the rest of his life, or the life of his company, and the only way he can continue to feed himself and his stockholders is to take my stuff that I paid him for away from me and force me to buy something else.
And for anyone who tells me that I only bought a "license" to use the software, I would simply point out that common law in most places doesn't allow the creation of contractual arrangements that don't provide equitable benefits to both sides. A EULA is a contractual arrangement in which the user pays money in return for which they are allowed to attempt to use something that may or may not work, and may or may not damage their data, in return for which the manufacturer guarantees nothing and incurs no obligation whatsoever. Unenforcible almost anywhere, if push comes to shove. In other words, pffffffft on yer EULA.
Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org
And I thought I was ranting :) ...
On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Ken Dibble krdibble@stny.rr.com wrote:
Still, I continue to refuse to accept the notion that software is a service that the service provider is allowed to change without my permission, and then stand there with a mercenary smirk and tell me I will really be better off if I buy his latest and greatest, even if his latest and greatest is slower, or harder to use, or less reliable than what I had before.
I think when Rick Strahl or Doug Hennig want me to pay for an upgrade or sign up for an annual support contract, it's much more of a situation where I'm putting food on their table or paying for new windsurfing gear, iow, paying them for their time, than when I'm forced to pay far more for far less from a faceless corporation, so I see this as a spectrum of commercial relationships ranging from mutually-beneficial to predatory. And the question of whether you "have to" upgrade certainly has an effect on that.
The guy who invented the jackhammer has no right to break my hammer and force me to buy a jackhammer, even if the jackhammer, and subtle variations on it, is the only thing he is capable of inventing for the rest of his life, or the life of his company, and the only way he can continue to feed himself and his stockholders is to take my stuff that I paid him for away from me and force me to buy something else.
I think a lot of the commercial OS vendors (MS, Apple, Google/Android) have a hard sell. They want to ship bug fixes and new features on their schedules and reduce their support costs, but that's not always at the customer's convenience. (Like, almost never.) Linux/BSD et al suffers from the same thing, though: you can stick with the old version, but you're gonna run into trouble with support and backported fixes, or you can jump into the new versions and struggle with the "new-and-improved" features that break your software or force you to learn new stuff (me, struggling with firewalld integration with fail2ban, and some new SNI-SSL features I'm wrestling with). Sometimes it seems like a "You can pay us now or you can pay us later" deal.
Change is what we're stuck coping with.
In other words, pffffffft on yer EULA.
Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org
Always appreciate your perspective, Ken. And I don't disagree with much of the sentiment.
At 15:47 2016-02-22, Ken Dibble krdibble@stny.rr.com wrote:
Yes, you may know what you really want (but not always) andreally need (not nearly so often the case). You are the guy with the money, and you are the guy who makes the decisions, and none of this guarantees that you are not about to make a totally stupid decision, or one that is severely lacking, or one that could be much better if you would listen to the professional in the area instead of fighting him.
This coming from the guy who regularly rants about having to stop using decades-old software because somebody else decided, in their vast wisdom, that something newer is better.
Is it really a surprise to you that there is more than one valid point of view on the issue?
Yes, end users get bullied by large software companies, but it is also true that software developers get bullied by companies.
None of us is perfect, and none of us is perfectly consistent, and we are all driven more than we like to admit by emotional responses to frustration and pressure when we respond to others. That includes me.
Bingo.
Still, I continue to refuse to accept the notion that software is a service that the service provider is allowed to change without my permission, and then stand there with a mercenary smirk and tell me I will really be better off if I buy his latest and greatest, even if his latest and greatest is slower, or harder to use, or less reliable than what I had before.
I quite agree with this.
Where I, as a software developer, get irked is when someone who does not know software development insists on me implementing something that I can tell is going to be trouble.
[snip]
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
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Gene Wirchenko -
Ken Dibble -
Ted Roche