At work we recently upgraded our Point-of-Sales software. We transitioned from an old version to a new version from the same company. (A good analogy would be we switched from Windows 2000 to Windows 7.) This transition was made about a year ago. Just recently we got word that our one year support was coming to an end. Ok, that is fine, we soon won’t get the company’s Customer Support for free anymore. I understand we have to pay for Customer Support. However, they also said that without a Support Agreement we wouldn’t receive any software updates. What?!
Is it legal or common practice to charge for a piece of software and then also charge for updates? I know this is common practice for anti-virus, however, I cannot think of any other type of software where regular updates are not part of the purchase price. (I mean imagine the lawsuits if Microsoft didn’t provide it’s updates for free.)
More for GD, but how can a software company get away with selling customers a piece of buggy (there are always bugs) software and not offer free updates?!
They can charge for updates or not as they like. There is no law telling them what they have to do.
In general updates are things that fix bugs in the software and usually companies give those away for free. You might be able to make a legal case that the software you bought does not work as advertised and without the patch you have not gotten what you paid for. Good luck with that though. Most EULA’s tend to let the company off that hook (IIRC many years ago there was a EULA from Lotus that essentially said the software in the box didn’t have to work at all).
The flip side for them is not giving their customers updates that fix bugs for free is a good way to piss off their customers and see them find other solutions. Not good business.
Client/server software often rolls the updates into the support price: my bug tracking system works this way, as do my version control and e-mail servers. If I stop paying for support for any of them, I don’t get future updates. In one case, I did stop paying, since the software was working well enough for me and the support price went up.
In my case, at least, that was all specified up front; they didn’t hide it in the contract and the support plans are generally very inexpensive–this may not be the case for you.
There is also the possibility that what they are referring to are new versions of the software, and that you’d still have access to patches even out of maintenance. That is, if you purchased version 4.0, with expired maintenance you have access to future 4.0 builds, but not 4.1.
It’s been a while since I last read anything about law regarding software, but last I understood the enforceability of EULAs was not a hard and fast thing. Judges can and have ruled that certain EULAs have no weight precisely because they went against reasonable expectations such as the one you describe.
When you purchase software or a license, you are purchasing its current form, and without specific terms that indicate free software updates, you must pay for them. With many products, updates are the only valuable feature of a service or support contract. Some companies offer seperate contracts for support and updates. I know of one case where a service contract to include updates must be paid for starting from the time of the original purchase, so customers will not wait until a problem occurs before starting to pay for service.
This is standard practice with most specialized software. Did Microsoft give out free copies of Windows 7 to everyone with Windows Vista? Is Blizzard going to give away the new Cataclysm update to everyone who has World of Warcraft? No, they charge for it, and that funds new development.
I used to own a software company, and it was the service contracts that paid for the software development team that did the updates.
Others have already said this, but as I used to run a POS software company I have direct knowledge of the specific situation. With our software, after the warranty expired you either took out a support & maintenance agreement, which got you fixes and updates, or you got nothing. In practice we never had a customer not take out such an agreement as the POS system is too critical to the business not to have support.
And Microsoft does not provide updates for free for many of its stuff. For commerical things like SQL Server you have to take out a Software Assurance contract (for 25% of the license price per annum, last I saw) to get updates to new versions.
If I understand correctly, the main reason for free updates in the first place is to fix security holes and bugs that make the product not work as advertised. The first seems to be to keep computers from getting infected and causing problems for others on the net, while the latter seems more of a PR or CYA thing: If your program is broken, people may not buy the next version, and may even get a refund on the version you already had.
This is the way for almost every software I use for work - CAD, data analysis, math/engineering, optical system design, etc. You don’t have to have continuous support though - we sometimes let the support contract expire, and a few years later, pay for a year’s support and get updated to the latest version.
Also, for a student version of such software, there’s usually no way to get any support - not even bugfix patches. Not even if you’re willing to pay for it.
Fixing security holes is something you will be familiar with from things like OS, browsers and Adobe, i.e. mass-used software that can be exploited by hackers. This is much less of an issue with commercial software products. Updates will certainly contain bug fixes, but will also often contain new functions and support for new hardware and levels of corequisite software. For example, support for Windows 7 or SQL Server 2008 R2. There will also be support for new standards, so in the POS world there are things like changes to credit card handling, barcode formats, WIC rules, sales taxes.
Providing these types of updates is not a CYA thing - it is an essential and normal part of doing business in this industry. It is a commercial arrangement that suits both supplier and user. The user pays a known amount of money per year (typically 15 - 20% of the license fee) and gets ongoing support and updates to the product to keep current in the market. The supplier gets a constant revenue stream that pays for the resource to develop the fixes and updates. Note also that the “support” part of the agreement allows the customer to call a support desk to get problems resolved/bypassed, usually with service level agreements as to response times - pretty important in the POS world if the system is down and the retailer cannot take money from its customers.
The ability to do that varies by vendor. Some software providers will make you pay for all the missing years maintenance fees before allowing you to get updates.
Well, Microsoft and other companies can get away with stopping all support for the old software once the new one has come out. If you like Win 3.11, have a small old PC on which it runs perfectly, but not the memory or processor to update to Win Vista/ Win 7, then you can’t get any updates to fix errors. With Linux, you can try reading the handbook to learn to write the code yourself (or pay someone to do it for you), but with Windows, you either live with a buggy product or buy new hardware that supports the new software. Or go without internet (where the virus etc. come from) and other programs (where the conflicts come from).