d. collins wrote:
I've purchased software and saw the company go out of business less then one year after that (and couldn't get a new key to reinstall it), so I certainly understand Dennis's concern. Several others suggested the recourse to hacks if MM happened to go down. But will they still be going around and easy to find five or ten years from now? I'm not so sure. I find legitimate the question of how be can be sure we'll be able to use our copy of Finale ten or even twenty years from now.
I, too, find Dennis's concerns about being able to use the software at some future point to be legitimate. And I also concede, that based upon past experiences, it is not farfetched that we might all upgrade in August, and have MakeMusic completely fail in December. But as far as Dennis' upgrade scheme is concerned, there is not complete certainty that in that event the Escrow company would still be around in December, either. I purchased five years worth of unlimited service from an ISP five years ago, that went bankrupt a couple of months after I purchased the service; because of concerns at the time I made the purchase, I asked about continuity of the service if the company failed and I was assured that arrangements were in place to make sure I got the full term of service. They were, but that company failed, too.
IN all honesty, given the installed base of files out there in Finale Formats, even if MakeMusic! were to completely dissapear tomorrow, I doubt that it would be more than a few months before someone else had a package out that would read files created with Finale.
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