<i>&gt; someone on HN equating SAAS to extortion</i><p>I&#x27;m getting a bit of an extremist regarding SaaS, I&#x27;m happy to admit it. It&#x27;s just that, the more it gets shoved in all sorts of businesses it doesn&#x27;t really belong, the more I realize is just a form of very modern rent-seeking.<p>When a product-making business moves to a forced SaaS model, it&#x27;s basically admitting defeat: it says the market does not value their work enough to profit from innovation alone, so from now on it will extract rent from established customers. That is depressing and exploitative.<p>I&#x27;m happy to have <i>the option</i> to turn my product-buying into a recurring event; but at the end of the day, in most cases I want to buy <i>products</i>, not to subscribe to a book-buying club. This because products <i>change</i>, in some cases for the worse. PyCharm in a few years might drop support for Python 2 (or something equivalent); why should I not be able to run an old installer <i>I paid for</i> whenever I need to work with Python 2 ?<p>I fear sooner or later somebody will file a class-action suit, and a lot of people will be sorry.