Fricken Quicken
I manage my personal finances with Quicken 2005. Quicken Customer Care just notified me that Quicken will discontinue support of the 2005 version on April 30, 2008.
Get this. They don't just mean that they won't provide technical support for the old version anymore. They mean that my existing functionality will cease to operate. I will no longer be able to download data from my bank.
It never occurred to me that a third party would be able to stand in between my client application and my financial services vendors. If my bank decided no longer to supply a file format for my old version of Quicken, well that would be between me and my bank. And if a software provider decided no longer to support an old release of an application, well I would be on my own as far as existing bugs. I accept that.
However, I expect to be able to use the existing functionality of a program I bought without obstruction from a third party. The application is a client that connects with a data provider. I expect to be able to fetch that data as long as the data provider provides it.
Quicken calls this a "sunset" provision, and yes it's mentioned in the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA). Per the sunset provision, they support the current version and two previous ones. I know, by buying the program and installing it I had to accept the EULA. On the other hand, I won't do it again. Continuing to use existing functionality to connect from my client software to my bank requires no "support" from a third party. I will not accept the sunset provision by purchasing another product from Intuit, the makers of Quicken.
Ironically, I wanted to upgrade my version of Quicken because I really like the product. However, I don't accept being required to do it.
I was going to start developing my own personal finance application using Universal Data Models out of my Len Silverstein books. I figured I would start out with a simple check register and put it in Access or mySQL. It turns out I don't have to. You can download free accounting software licensed under the GNU GPL called GnuCash.
