Whatever happens, do NOT go to a ‘subscription model’.
I’ve had to abandon software titles I like because ‘recurring subscriptions’ do not fit into the purchase order scheme of bureaucratic institutions like schools, or people working on grants and endowments. I personally find the ‘subscription fees’ fair enough; however, it can be a bureaucratic nightmare to get such purchases approved. The worst part is that subscriptions ‘limit’ the numbers and types of budgets someone like a high school Band, Orchestra, or Choir teacher can tap into for the purchase.
For all its faults, the nice thing about dongle-ware, is that I can buy it for a music program in a bureaucratic institution more like I would a ream of paper…from the ‘consumable budget’. Or, if it cost more than a certain amount I can order it with funds from the ‘equipment’ budget (like we would do for a new tuba) and put it on inventory…with a state inventory sticker on the dongle and everything. The ‘key itself’ is something that can be inventoried and accounted for with less ‘red tape’ than ‘password protected accounts on a foreign server’. It’s nice that the dongle can be ‘checked out’ and ‘returned’…similar to a library book, without giving away passwords or breaching ethics.
Once it gets into ‘subscriptions’, and/or can ONLY be itemized or budgeted as ‘software’, through the institution’s ‘computer people’…it’s a whole new set of eyes that have to ‘approve’ the purchase…PLUS, the number and sorts of budgets that can be tapped are seriously narrowed down.
In the USA, I dare go out on a limb and project that MOST band and orchestra halls in secondary schools do NOT get internet connections. If they get a PC at all, it’s usually the bare bones, 10 year old hand-me-downs that were worn out by the ‘typing lab’, and if there is internet at all, it’s firewalled to hell and back and NOTHING gets through without the approval of 20 different heads in 10 different departments. So…we have to use our own hardware, and get creative in finding ways to legally leverage any kind of ‘budget’ at our disposal to get these sorts of tools.
Sadly, I already had to move one ‘endowment’ built computer lab (the hardware parts) over to Finale from Sibelius because the whole ‘subscription’ thing pushed things into a whole new class of purchase, with a whole new ‘set of rules’…of which requests for ‘music software’ doesn’t even make the ‘priority list’ (Avid has since made some adjustments for the better, but too late now). Getting some of the states to approve music software from software budgets is about as pointless as trying to get an Arban’s method book for brass on the ‘state text book’ list so parents don’t have to sell candy bars and wash cars to get them. In many states, it’s not going to happen anytime soon that ‘music software’ gets on the list of ‘approved software titles’ that can be purchased with state money through the school ‘software budgets’.
I’m all for more and better ‘options’ for all different sorts of users. I just hope that some way always remains to simply ‘buy a product in a box’ either as a consumable (for lower priced products), or as a piece of major equipment (for more expensive titles), depending on what budgets we can shuffle around. From there we can slap an inventory label on it, activate it one time…then use it anywhere. The dongle does that rather well…so I hope it remains a ‘choice’.