Sellers ask for subscriptions regularly, and the reasoning is sound: maintenance is ongoing and a one-off payment does not fund it. We have not built it, and it is worth being clear about why rather than leaving it as silence.
What a licence promises today
You buy it, you own it, it does not expire, and it survives the seller leaving. That is a strong promise and it is the reason a lot of buyers are comfortable here. A subscription is a different promise, and mixing the two carelessly weakens the first one.
The question that has to be answered first
What happens when somebody stops paying. If the item keeps working, the subscription is really a support plan, which we already have in support renewals. If the item stops working, then a buyer who paid for two years owns nothing, and that is a very different marketplace from this one.
The seller-leaving problem
A one-off licence survives a seller closing their store. A subscription cannot, because there is nobody to provide what is being paid for. Any design has to say honestly what happens to subscribers on that day, before anybody subscribes.
What already exists
Support renewals. A buyer extends author support and pays again for the thing that genuinely costs the seller time. That covers most of the real need without touching what ownership means.
Where this is going
Probably towards optional recurring support plans rather than towards software that switches itself off. If that changes, it will be announced plainly and it will not apply retroactively to anything already sold.
