{"id":94787,"date":"2025-08-30T01:00:39","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=94787"},"modified":"2025-08-29T09:51:04","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T13:51:04","slug":"qotd-saas-software-as-an-intolerable-swarm-of-blood-sucking-leeches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/08\/30\/qotd-saas-software-as-an-intolerable-swarm-of-blood-sucking-leeches\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: SaaS &#8211; software as an &#8220;intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 25px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Commercial desktop software is getting worse, not better. I&#8217;ve been generally aware of this for a while &mdash; the relentless pull away from &#8220;you pay for it once and own it&#8221; to monthly subscription models that extract money from you forever has been a leading indicator. <\/p>\n<p>But my friend @DrInsensitive reports that the enshittification is accelerating. He says that in addition to a lot of tediously stupid UI changes, his most recent upgrade of CorelDraw now spams ads at him even when CorelDraw itself is not running! Furthermore the plague of microtransactions that has afflicted AA games for years is spreading &mdash; the set of free fill patterns for rectangles that his old version had is gone, instead when he tries to fill a rectangle he gets a pop-up invitation to buy an extra-cost feature pack of them.<\/p>\n<p>When one asshole vendor thinks they&#8217;ve successfully numbed their user base into accepting this kind of crap, others immediately follow. We&#8217;ve seen this movie before, we know how it ends &mdash; with applications, like games, designed to be deliberately frustrating and low-level awful, intended to give you itches that you can only scratch by buying their endless parade of &#8220;enhancements&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure a surcharge to suppress the spammy CorelDraw ads won&#8217;t be long in coming. And soon after that it will be everywhere. <\/p>\n<p>If this goes on, open-source software will finally win the desktop not because it&#8217;s gotten enough better but because closed-source desktop applications have reached final form as an intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches.<\/p>\n<p>This is not the way I was looking forward to winning.<\/p>\n<p>ESR, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/esrtweet\/status\/1903298606544666919\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, 2025-03-22.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commercial desktop software is getting worse, not better. I&#8217;ve been generally aware of this for a while &mdash; the relentless pull away from &#8220;you pay for it once and own it&#8221; to monthly subscription models that extract money from you forever has been a leading indicator. But my friend @DrInsensitive reports that the enshittification is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,41,15],"tags":[409,1563,1235,93,92],"class_list":["post-94787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-corporations","tag-enshittification","tag-esr","tag-opensource","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-oEP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94787"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97576,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94787\/revisions\/97576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}