Buying software sucks

A big reason I got into free software was due to my formative experiences with buying commercial software, mostly for writing music.

That stuff was jank.

Compatibility

It only worked on one platform: Mac. Always Mac.

If it did work on Windows, it didn't work on my version of Windows. Maybe times have changed, but my version of Windows was either too old, too new, was missing a service pack, needed to be 64-bit, didn't work with 64-bit, and so on.

I laugh at you if you think you might find the software available on Linux. No one was building for that, because no company ever cared to.

If I had the source, I could have even attempted to build for my platform. Alas, I did not have the source.

Price

Music software was a premium product, I guess, so it commanded a premium price.

It was so, so expensive. I mean, I get that. There's five people that want to buy this software and it's a huge amount of work to produce. That'll be $5000 please.

But you had to just keep buying it. Every new version, every expansion, every plugin that you needed.

It made me wonder. Was the software expensive because the market was so small? Or was the market so small because the software was so expensive?

Who knows how many would-be recording artists were just priced out?

Reliability

Especially on Windows, my music software crashed all the time, and I don't know why.

I remember I bought a little synth plugin at one point. It worked for about a day, then never worked again. It came with a MIDI interface that had horrible latency. Who knows why or how.

When audio software crashed, it wasn't just a little baby crash. It was a burn-my-computer-to-the-ground kind of crash. A how-is-there-not-smoke kind of crash. My computer wasn't coming back from that. I was gonna have to reboot.

Again, without access to the source, there was little I could do to troubleshoot the problem, let alone fix it.

License keys

Early on, they'd include a license key in the box. I'd have to guard it with my life because who knows what would happen if I lost it.

The real fun part was when I bought boxed software at the store, got it home, and then it told me that my license key had already been used. Hah! Has it now? I'd take it back to the store. They'd tell me they can't accept it because it's already been opened. Really now! Fancy that. Good bye, $300.

I've never been locked out of free software.

License servers

Later, they came up with the "license server". This was like a license key, but now I needed an Internet connection to use the software I already bought on my own machine.

Prior to this, I kept my audio machine disconnected from the Internet, since I used an ancient version of Windows and I didn't want Wi-Fi messing with my audio latency. See Compatibility above.

Accounts

License server of course means I now needed to create an account somewhere to install my software.

But what happened when the company that owned the license server got bought out by another vendor? I'll tell you what. My account stopped working, and I had to call someone to get it fixed, except that person couldn't fix it because that was another team and I couldn't contact them.

That money was gone now. Bye bye, $400.

License dongles

At one point, they came out with these license dongles.

Imagine a giant, plasticky USB drive that must be plugged in at all times to your computer so that your expensive synthesizer software worked. Amazing.

Of course, the license dongle has to WORK. I actually bought one of these things at one point only to discover that I couldn't get the dongle to work with the software it was supposed to work with. See Reliability and Accounts above.

I don't have time for this

I don't know why anyone puts up with this. Few things in life aggravate me like being told:

• where and how I can install my software,

• that I can only have it installed on one computer,

• that it won't work for my platform,

• that they have no intention of making it work, and

• that I should buy a new computer and new OS if I want it to work.

Forget that.

Today, I go to great lengths to avoid commercial software. I do it so don't have to deal with this.

Free software has its own problems, but they're problems I can manage and do something about. I have agency, whereas commercial vendors would be happy to take my money and give me nothing in return if they thought they could get away with it.

So I'm sticking with free software.