Back when I first started getting into the internet and hadn’t started using Linux yet, I needed a way to get onto the chat protocol known as IRC. Back then I used mIRC. Later on I started using Linux and used all kinds of IRC programs including XChat, BitchX, and Konversation. But recently most open source projects (which is what I’d used it for recently) have moved to the Matrix protocol. So I was surprised to see that mIRC was still a thing when I saw this news post:

mIRC ended its lifetime license agreement with all who purchased its software 10 years out. Basically, the dev is no longer going to honor his lifetime license (I’ve always found it hard to decide whether to get one of these and whether the devs would honor it or stop making the software). The comments were mixed – some were grateful he was still working on it. Others, like me, felt that lifetime is lifetime. You should not give out a lifetime license if your’e not going to offer it.