Software has a problem.
OK, it has many problems. I’ve already highlighted one of them. But this is another important one.
The problem is that software—all software, with no exceptions—sucks. The reason for this is multifaceted and we could spend years and years arguing about who has the larger list of reasons, but in the end it boils down to the proverbial shoemaker’s children: Our development tools are the worst of the worst in software.
I don’t think it’s the right general solution, but the solution to the specific problem framed by the OP is software as a service. You get a free trial, then you pay monthly, as long as you continue using it. So the developer is incentivised to make the software work properly.
Software as a service has its strengths but has more weaknesses from the perspective of someone trying to base their own business model on it.
If compilers were SaaS, for example, there’s no way to make stable, confirmed firmware. (Hell, it’s hard enough to do that when you in theory control your own software!) For some sectors (like the sector I work in) this is an absolute necessity. You can’t have a sudden change in the compiler happening out from under you making your firmware’s hash value different and thus requiring another (expensive!) round of verification.
And this doesn’t even count the problem of using a third party’s continued existence in the core of your own business. My employer owns the IAR seats that it has. (Does IAR suck? Of course it does! Have you not been paying attention!? 🤣) If IAR go out of business tomorrow, we can still do our work because the software is on our machines. If we SaaSed our tooling, we’d be fucked when a single vendor goes under, along with their servers.
If there could be some way to guarantee stability of SaaS, both in terms of release management and in terms of persistence beyond the scope of the company offering it, SaaS could very well be a way for companies to be forced into upping their game, but I personally can’t even envision the solution to those two critical problems.