Support period for Perpetual Licenses?
How long is a major version now supported for?
I have been a happy user of (most recently) CO22, but with the purchase of an R8, am now needing to upgrade and... things have changed, with CO leaning hard into subscriptions (new marketing manager poached from Adobe?).
CO was on an annual release cycle with predictable version numbers and - by extension - a year of updates, but now appears to be rather more fluid.
Since 2023 the second digit is now deemed a "major" release, and whilst 16.3.0 ("CO24" if you will) came as usual in late 2023, 16.4.0 was then released just 6 months later in May 2024.
To be clear, I'm not grubbing for feature updates. I'm happy to buy a license for a feature-set and that's what I get, and if I want more features I have to upgrade. Fair. But I am *less* happy to pay for a "snapshot" of a bit of software, bugs-and-all.
If I bought 16.3 in January 2024, then I would reasonably expect 16.3.x bug and optimisation fixes to be issued for at least 6-12 months (in keeping with consumer protection law in the UK and most of Europe, which protects consumers against product defects in the first 6 months. Bugs are defects and should be fixed).
So my question is... even with the release of 16.4.x, have there been parallel bug-only 16.3.x releases since May? Because there *should* have been. The early launch of 16.4 should not have automatically sunset 16.3 support. 16.4.x releases should have been released with a parallel bug-only 16.3.x release (where appropriate). If someone reported a bug in April 2024, it would self-evidently not be appropriate to say "Oh yeah, we fixed that defect from 16.3 but you'll have to buy 16.4 to get it because we're doing major releases every 6 months now". It was found within 6 months of launch, 16.3 license holders should get the patch.
It may be that there has been ongoing support and it's all fine and dandy. But I couldn't find a history of when minor releases have been issued for 16.3.x and it's all a bit unclear as to what you get for your money, since CO are at liberty to announce a new "major" version arbitrarily. I'd like to know I'm going to get 6-12months to report any bugs and receive fixes for such!
Thanks.
(Personally, for a £300 bit of software I'd expect 18-24mo of bug fixes & camera updates but not software features - akin to most "stable" or LTS operating system releases, this is software we're building workflows around after all. Over 2 years that would work out at £12.50/mo for base version + bug fixes, about the same as the subscription which includes features. Alas, that's not the direction the industry has taken us. Apparently we now either jump on the subscription treadmill or get short shrift).
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I had the same bad feeling of you. But I would like thinking that reality is not so "negative against perpetual customers".
Then first of all, I want to ask CaptureOne team to make available a table with all issuing dates for every update. That is a missing information, really due to all your customers. Thanks
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Me too. I just noticed the 16.5 release and downloaded it, upgraded my catalog calmly thinking all would be well given I only just paid for my Pro license on the 1st Sept '24. Now on the 24th October I see that the new version isn't covered under the license I bought just about two months ago! Looking at the cost of adding a further Pro license (with discount a further 179GBP) it'd be cheaper for me to join the Adobe Photographer's bundle crowd.. I'd have paid 360GBP for less than a year of capture one Pro... I too aren't looking for major upgraded features but feel somewhat scammed by CaptureOne now :/
As a side problem, I've now messed up my catalogue since it upgraded it on the new version post install so I have the hassle of going back to 16.4.6 and recreating my catalogue.
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The update left me feeling pretty same. It seems I was careless when I bought a new perpetual license about a year ago and missed the news about the change in update policy. So after the new about update was posted, I opened C1 to work in it and waited for the offer to download update and now found out that I can't get this update
I'm not too interested in these new trendy AI features. But it would be nice to get an update for bugs and missing basic features like batch processing for old-released HDR merging (for which I still keep the damn Lightroom on my PC, although I bought the new version largely for merging, which turned out to be impossible to use regularly)
This is disappointment in the policy of a company that I always said makes a high-quality professional tool, unlike the superficial and poorly optimized Adobe. It seems that the difference between them is decreasing in the approach to features and in relationships with users both
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