Hey FSFE community,
I really like to hear your points of view on a thought I had.
The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is set to require companies to keep providing updates for the lifetime of a product. That will mean an increased an continued effort (thus cost) by the vendor.
I expect that this will encourage the practice of subscription models. In this way the vendor has recurring income and has some control over the availability of a product or service. Regardless whether these are SaaS services, physical products products of installable software applications. Some functionality might be available without using services, but that would be so limited that it would hardly justify the purchase and so you are strongly compelled to get the subscription.
For sure the market will allow for different funding model to compete and it is ultimately up to users to decide. But take the Adobe Creative Suite as an example; there are now many artists that are bound to monthly payment to obtain access to access and modify their work. Or how about the fitness trackers that need a subscription model to access the data and analysis for which you bought it in the first place.
Personally I think the trend towards subscription models is a negative one as a user is required to keep paying for continued development and can not decide to be content with the existing version. Worse is that proprietary standard and access to data are used as leverage to compel users to sign up and keep the subscription.
What do you think? Is there are a trend towards subscription models? How does that affect user freedom? Does the planned CRA encourage the trend towards subscription models?
Looking forward to your thoughts, Nico