Agreed. In the pre-internet days you had rigid version releases, there was a time investment in version 1, it released, people bought it and used it, no bugfixes, patches or anything. Then a year or two later, there was version 2, and you could buy that to get the improvements, or just use your old version just fine.

That sort of model collapses where software needs to be constantly updated and maintained lest it rots and dies as the rest of the ecosystem evolves and something dynamically linked changes by a hair. So what's left is either doing that maintenance for free, i.e. FOSS, or charging for it on a monthly basis like SAAS. We've mostly done this bullshit to ourselves in the name of fast updates and security. Maybe it was inevitable.