Ulysses, infected by a trendy virus, changes to all-Subscription model

Posted by Prion
Aug 11, 2017 at 02:56 PM

Hewson et al are not entirely wrong, in fact, he is right about the fact that someone must pay. If it is not you, then it must be somebody else (in many cases I suspect it may be a hopeful but underpaid developer) or else the product will vanish within short time.
Where he and the other folk writing articles about how wonderful Ulysses move towards a subsription are utterly wrong, however, is that he openly assumes that he is in any way representative of the average use case. Which he is not. He has published best-selling books and can afford to pay however much Ulysses is charging him for providing him with one of the major tools that earns his income. And that’s the same thing with many other people welcoming this move that we read about.

The majority of us simply don’t earn their money by putting words on paper. We need to write one way or another. My institution provides me with a license for Word and simply because I am a rebel and don’t like Word I have a multitude of licenses for other programs I can write better in. Just as spreadsheets. Databases. Todo lists. Productivity tools. Tinderbox. Devonthink.

If I wanted to provide every nice developer with a steady income (which I do) I’d quickly be spending my entire income (which I don’t) because frankly, many of the tools I sometimes use aren’t as central to my professional life as Ulysses is to Hewson or some of the tech bloggers. They are just a very vocal crowd.
What I take home from this is that a developer is no more obliged to give away the fruit of his/her labour cheaply than I am to pay whatever they would like me to. Time to pare down my software arsenal and weed out some old but seldomly used old friends, I guess.

Chris

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
The author David Hewson, one of Ulysses’s biggest fans, offers a
>perspective opposite of mine:
> >https://davidhewson.com/2017/08/11/the-new-ulysses-subscription-plan-is-a-wonderful-idea/
> >Steve Z.