I expected to read this and furiously disagree with the author, but I 100% agree with the point that is being made. I just don't think it is semantic versioning that is to blame.
It would be nice to see more responsibility taken for backwards compatibility. Realize that any amount of time saved in not maintaining backwards compatibility is going to be wasted, many, many times over, by all your downstream users that have to rewrite their code, or to re-learn how to use end-user software. We are not being nice to each other and social (ideally economic) pressure ought to punish those that do that. We should stop pretend that a product is still the same after a breaking major version change.
Interestingly the only examples of great handling of major versions that I can think of are from games. There are many games that have new major versions published (say, Warcraft 3) that still allow you to keep playing the old major version, still make it possible to buy the old version, still support both versions, and make it trivial to have both installed if you want that. Something that ought to be perfectly normal behavior that we could expect from all software.
It would be nice to see more responsibility taken for backwards compatibility. Realize that any amount of time saved in not maintaining backwards compatibility is going to be wasted, many, many times over, by all your downstream users that have to rewrite their code, or to re-learn how to use end-user software. We are not being nice to each other and social (ideally economic) pressure ought to punish those that do that. We should stop pretend that a product is still the same after a breaking major version change.
Interestingly the only examples of great handling of major versions that I can think of are from games. There are many games that have new major versions published (say, Warcraft 3) that still allow you to keep playing the old major version, still make it possible to buy the old version, still support both versions, and make it trivial to have both installed if you want that. Something that ought to be perfectly normal behavior that we could expect from all software.