How to handle software with paid major version upgrades?

[ThioJoe]

I was thinking about how some companies release a new major version of software every year, but current owners would need to pay to upgrade to the latest version. For example, Camtasia 2020 vs 2021 or whatever.

Should this software maybe have each 'year' / major version get it's own separate entry? Otherwise, if someone doesn't want to pay for a new version, they'll have to constantly see an upgrade available.

Maybe it's semantics, but one could argue that if a paid upgrade is required to buy a new 'version', it could be considered a totally independent piece of software. Or as a thought, perhaps in the future, there could be an option to ignore upgrades for higher major versions?

[denelon]

@ThioJoe we've encountered a broad range of behaviors for the way various installers report their versions, and how publishers / Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) report software versions (IntelliJ IDEA is a great example for this). I'm not sure there is a one size fits all here. We've been discussing some of the differences with respect to package pinning and the current behavior for several programming languages to present "major" versions as different packages (Java is a great example for this).

We've also seen some suggestions related to how the "License" could be used. I think one of our bigger challenges is related to the nature of a community submitted package as opposed to one published by a "verified publisher".

This is a great topic to have for the community as well as software publishers and ISVs.