Unfortunately, I can tell from your response that you&#x27;ve never actually experienced this. If you&#x27;re a small business, and you&#x27;re buying let&#x27;s say some of the big name CAD software, you&#x27;re <i>easily</i> into 4 figures per seat. You&#x27;re also so small that a lot of the companies making that software won&#x27;t even talk to you directly; you get to buy via a reseller or not at all.<p>That reseller will offer you the standard licensing terms or you&#x27;re welcome to shop elsewhere. You can ask about support, and if you&#x27;re lucky you&#x27;ll get an answer that is somewhat related to your original question, but I have never seen more than platitudes in response to even direct, explicit questions about some of the issues we&#x27;re talking about. Any requests for actual support are also just directed to the reseller if you do manage to make contact with the actual developers, and you&#x27;ll be subject to some of the strictest licence control and activation procedures in the industry.<p>You aren&#x27;t going to be individually negotiating your licensing and support terms with the developers. The developers aren&#x27;t even going to talk to you at any point in the proceedings. And pretty much everyone making software in this league works the same way, so your &quot;terrible decision&quot; is to buy the software you need to do your job, as opposed to your only other choice, which is not to use software to do your job at all.<p>A concrete example, perhaps familiar to more people: Adobe&#x27;s Creative Suite had some pretty aggressive activation technology built into it in later versions before they went to Creative Cloud, and unsurprisingly quite a few businesses haven&#x27;t migrated to their new rental model. If you have a permanent licence with, say, CS5, you&#x27;re still as entitled to use it as you always were, and you can also use Adobe&#x27;s tools to deactivate it on one PC and reactivate it afterwards if you need to reinstall your OS or upgrade to new hardware. But there are two stings in the tail: firstly, any new installation requires access to those servers to activate, and secondly, the initial releases were very buggy and some updates are needed to stabilise them.<p>As of today, to the best of my knowledge, the activation server still works for installation, as long as Adobe&#x27;s people haven&#x27;t got wildly inaccurate information in their database, which from personal experience can certainly happen. However, once you&#x27;ve installed you get prompted to update but then told the updates aren&#x27;t available when you try to do so. The update installation tool is, apparently, no longer supported. Of course, if you&#x27;d like to trade in your otherwise perfectly useful software, they&#x27;ll be happy to have you on their new locked-in, rental plan instead. <i>This</i> is the kind of artificial nerfing I&#x27;m talking about.<p>As a final point, just to be clear: I am <i>not</i> advocating for permanent, free of charge support under all circumstances. We haven&#x27;t figured out how to reliably build software with no bugs yet, and it&#x27;s unrealistic to aim for that. However, in most fields, if you pay a significant amount of money for something, you are legally entitled to get what you paid for or to receive compensations. The software industry collectively takes a lot of liberties with providing something that isn&#x27;t even close to what the customer was actually paying for, and often tries to weasel out of meeting the same obligations anyone else would have to in terms of quality and fitness for purpose via legalese and funny licensing agreements, all the while making billions in revenues from customers who are getting substandard products. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s unreasonable to question whether the current balance of power is appropriate or whether some software developers could do a considerably better job of providing working software that does what their customers are paying for.