Considering the wide availability of beta OS updates, I'd say that's on the developers of said software. Sure, as someone who works in audio and has to deal with a range of software instruments/effects and audio interface drivers, I know exactly what you're talking about and I have little understanding for developers expensive software/hardware that don't test and fix their products before OS releases.
Considering the wide availability of beta OS updates, I'd say that's on the developers of said software.
Why? If the developers produced a product that works and sold it to a user at a fair price, why on earth should those developers then have some sort of indefinite responsibility for producing updates because other people chose to break compatibility?
There is a reason we have standards and there is a reason it's important for system software in particular to define and support standard interfaces. In fact, that is arguably the primary function of an operating system: to provide a stable platform on which other software can run.
The fact that some of the main OS providers no longer seem to recognise this and instead consider instability and backward-incompatibility to be strategic assets makes me genuinely afraid for the near future of our industry. If I want to do something as simple as buying a laptop for one of my small businesses tomorrow, so someone can get on with useful work and will be able to continue doing so for a long time, there are currently no good options available.
I certainly disagree on this point. Take the case of a small software company that ends up not being all that successful. I purchase a license for said software; it is useful for me, but the company goes out of business since they are unprofitable.
Now Apple breaks backwards compatibility with this software when I upgrade.
Even in the case of the software maker still being in business, should they have to provide me free upgrades for life? If they do that then they have diminishing profits with every upgrade. On the flip side, should I have to pay for a new license when I don't need the new features and am perfectly happy staying on the existing version if it only would continue to work?
To give two quick examples of this I used to run Parallels on my Mac so I could run a couple of Windows apps that I absolutely had to have and it would have been very inconvenient to use a boot camp setup and reboot every time I needed access. Then when the Mac version changed Parallels quit working; my only option was to buy a new license for Parallels. To make matters worse; you never really know what software will break when there is an upgrade, but if you don't upgrade then you end up in the boat that some other piece of software you are running does get updated, but you can't use that software without getting the latest version of Mac.
When I compare this to Windows; I'm still running today on Windows 10 software that I purchased for Windows 95. For all of the many things I dislike about Windows; the one thing I applaud them for is their level of backwards compatibility.
