My early (2011) purchase of Apple's Final Cut Pro X has been pretty awesome. I originally bought the software using discounted iTunes gift cards so i paid around 200€ instead of 250. Nowadays it costs 350€.
There have been countless big updates, all for free. It can now edit 360° and multicam footage and many more features like object tracking and HDR support have been added for free. Just browse the long list of release notes at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201237 and you'll get the idea.
I've been a Jetbrains customer from the very first release, introduced the product in every company I came into. Switched to VS and then switched back. I do think Jetbrains does a lot things right, they also honored past licenses and helped when I had license trouble. So now for some years im on an All Products Pack license and it's nice to just install whatever you want.
Industrial software perpetual licenses are really perpetual. Those things will outlast the company that wrote them and they don’t have claw-back mechanisms
One of my original Joyent lifetime licenses is still active. I had a shared hosting lifetime plan and one of their container services as a lifetime plan, both of those are long gone. But they sold off Strongspace to Expandrive and that's still going, somehow. It's only 100gb, so, not exactly huge amounts of storage these days, but it's all still accessible, though the service doesn't seem to have been updated since I originally bought it either lol.
I have a license for an MP3 tagging software called Tag&Rename from what's probably a one man shop called Softpointer that still works 14 years after purchase. I'd been using it for free for a few years at that point. The last release was in 2018 but it still does what I want. Maybe I'll buy another to show my support.
I think the ones that give a lifetime license to a freemium like version of their app often do better than those who give lifetime to the overall.
But if I pay a few bucks and get 2-3 years of use I'm probably going to be pretty happy. If I spend tons of bucks then I'll probably be less than happy.
In all seriousness though, I think the only lifetime licenses that come to mind are probably ones like JetBrains and old software where you had the install medium on a disk and a key to install it with and it required no software updates, assuming the software doesn't need the internet to verify, you're pretty much guaranteed what you paid for. Don't you miss lifetime ownership of software licenses? :)
Oh I understand that. The server doesn't even need to go down, a specific NFT can simply be blacklisted. I was asking to see if there is something I'm missing.
I was making a one off joke about how long an NFT theoretically could last (until the blockchain itself dies due to nobody using it, or what have you). The rest of my commentary was quite serious.
I like the jetbrains model well enough.