Basically: it's a subscription, but you get to keep the last features you got on it if you cancel. Owners of the original Halide got a year of free updates.
We have never, ever locked away Halide from people who already purchased it. If you bought Halide 1.0 in 2017, you can still use it today, with all the features you bought, without paying another penny.
It seems there is a simple solution. You pay the subscription monthly, until after 1 year you own the current version. If you stop the subscription at that point you don't get rolling updates or SLA support.
Your statement is misleading. Your statement is only true if you only pay for subscription for a single year. As the other poster pointed out you get a perpetual licence for any version you paid for 12 month or more. So in the example you link if I continue the subscription for another 4 month I will be able to keep v2.
The screen brightness changing is free forever. The license is unlimited (not yearly subscription) and only for the Pro features (automatic adaptive brightness, sensor integration etc.)
>But with a very customer-friendly clause of where if you pay for a subscription for 12 months you get a perpetual license for the latest version of the product when you initially subscribed. And then after paying for any particular version of a product for 12 months, you also get a perpetual license for that particular version and so on and so forth
This came about due to a decent amount of consumer backlash, if I recall correctly. They used to sell standalone perpetual licenses which included a period of updates.
Ah, that makes sense honestly. I bought their lifetime license and I'm a subscription user. Kinda sounds like the right thing to do is refund the lifetime license holders if they've changed architecture and direction that drastically.
I bought Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer in May of this year, less than 6 months ago. Some companies that offer perpetual licenses would simply give me the upgrade to the next version for free since it came out within a year, and basically all of them would offer an upgrade discount that isn't simply a launch sale, into perpetuity.
The price is good for decent software but it's kind of discouraging me from wanting to upgrade, when their goal should be the exact opposite of that.
Personally, they had lost my goodwill already with their old upgrade policy. If you bought a license on 01/2014, it expired on 12/2014, and you didn't need the product again until 04/2015, the upgrade you purchase in April begins on 01/2015, retroactively beginning after the end of the previous license. So you don't get the full 12 months they charge you for. When I realized that it was the end of my support for them.
I'll probably stick with my version 3 license. (Upgrade from V2, which was upgraded from V1 from before leitmotif owned it!) I feel for them, Kaleidoscope is an awesome and basically complete application. Adding a subscription was probably not the way to go but I don't know how you'd otherwise make revenue off of it.
Not quite: once you've paid for a version for twelve consecutive months you get a perpetual license to that version. If you unsubscribe you keep your perpetual licenses.
The new Manycam owners also trashed lifetime licences. They immediately released version 8 and refused to provide perpetual keys for the new version to customers that had bought lifetime licences. They also refused to offer any refunds.
In fact, you are paying $120 for a license and then getting a year's worth of free upgrades. After your subscription ends, you're still allowed to use that version.
What was the lifetime license for? Updates? If so, are they still updating the plugin? If it's still being updated, and they didn't just abandon it altogether a few months after you bought a lifetime subscription, it seems to me that you got what you expected and what they told you you were getting.
Companies regularly have a clause in their subscription that if the service is discontinued they get a perpetual right to the last version. Sadly this doesn't seem common for consumer software.
The license seems to say that if you stop paying, you can still use the most recent version as of when your subscription expired. So technically you could subscribe for one month, get the software, and keep using it until you saw a version that was compelling enough to upgrade to.
They are not 'all in' on the subscription model: if you stop paying you still get to use the last version issued while you were a subscriber. (Or maybe the one that was the current one when you paid your yearly subscription, but it doesn't make much of a difference.) They call it 'perpetual fallback license'.
I think it's a fair compromise between owning what you have paid for and being able to fund continuous development of the platform (and also to be able to receive updates without having to make a buy/skip decision all the time).
Also, they are not a Russian company and have severed ties with Russia a few weeks after the war has started.
I managed to get a Capture One 22 license for half price (when I was quitting Adobe), I did the trial and the let it expire - I actually was just going to buy it but forgot. Then I just got an email like "Hey, would half price be enough incentive?" and I was like, "Sure".
It looks like things have changed somewhat with the perpetual licensing since then, but the version I have does what I want for the cameras I use and supports Apple Silicon, so I hope to keep using this version for the next four or five years so without paying any more...
But good to have alternatives, I'll definitely look at this software in a few years if something happens like incompatibility with a future version of macOS or something.
> On June 30, 2022, we entered into a License Agreement with Visicom (the "License
Agreement"), pursuant to which we agreed to distribute, at the discretion and
direction of Visicom, a specified number of ManyCam software updates to certain
license holders to whom Visicom has previously granted a "lifetime" license to
ManyCam software. As consideration for distributing the software updates,
Visicom paid us an initial upfront nonrefundable payment of $65,000. The License
Agreement provides that Visicom may purchase additional licenses at prices
specified therein. Other than providing a one-time, limited license to Visicom
for the distribution of ManyCam software updates pursuant to the terms of the
License Agreement, we do not have any obligation to provide support or service
to the licensee end users.
https://lux.camera/pro-camera-action-introducing-halide-mark...
Basically: it's a subscription, but you get to keep the last features you got on it if you cancel. Owners of the original Halide got a year of free updates.
HN thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24860043
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