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Buy once, use forever A directory of one-time purchase software

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222 points richbowen | 1 comments | 30 Mar 25 00:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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ghaff ◴[30 Mar 25 01:08 UTC] No.43520251[source]▶
Unless it's (maybe) mainfraame software, your software is going to break with an OS update. O you can maybe keep it working for a while in a VM, but the idea that you'll keep a software binary working forever is, for practical purposes, mostly silly.
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1. Aachen ◴[30 Mar 25 01:15 UTC] No.43520303[source]▶
Is it? I'm pretty sure Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 continued to function on Windows Vista (released some ten years after the game) and in Windows 7 everything besides saving worked, and iirc there was a trick for that as well. These things can last a long time

Weird example perhaps but that's one of the oldest totally unmaintained things I used back in my Windows days. WINE may also be a way to run older Windows wares without needing a whole VM setup

On Android, I also use software written for Android 4 on Android 10 without problems. The permission model got more strict so it asks you for giving some blanket permissions because those weren't granular at that SDK/API version (iirc network and storage access are two of the three main ones), but after that one-time confirmation it works perfectly, and from f-droid I also trust that it doesn't abuse these permissions

Of course, there's also plenty of counterexamples. GOG exists for a reason, patching up games to run on modern OSes. I guess it's a risk but I don't generally expect most things to break with every version upgrade