That is the old way. You bought some application and it came with upgrades until next major version release or similar. Then when that release came out you could decide to pay again or just keep using the old (now unsupported) version you already paid for.

That solved all the issues with paying for maintenance, but sadly someone must have figured out a mandatory subscription was a better way to make more money.

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johannes1234321 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's not only a way to make more money, but it also matches better to modern development approaches.

Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release.

Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.

	▲	3036e4 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That was probably true a long time ago, but I bought software using that model that did not have any physical releases and at least one had frequent minor releases adding new features. It seems to me like the "subscription model" is exactly the same, except for the use of DRM and cloud dependencies to force users to pay for new versions. The only thing that changed was that the option to remain on an old version was taken away from users.