What happens after Paddle?

General
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I am confused about the relation of the Scrivener license to Paddle. I am a licensed user of first Scrivener 1.x and then Scrivener 3.x. But what happens if, god forbid, Literature and Latte folds, and thus Scrivener’s account with Paddle ends? Does this mean that the license key becomes unusable, as it could no longer be checked with Paddle, and hence one loses either the use of Scrivener or the ability to reinstall it? Is there some reassurance about this?

I love various features of Scrivener, and how it is designed with usability in the fore. But as I have more and more and more material stored in Scrivener, I an starting to worry. The issue of Paddle affects how much I can use Scrivener as a secure place for data, and not just for writing articles. Yes, I know the files with this data will always be there and readable in rtf form. That’s important. But it will be painful to find the connections between this data and to transfer this data to some other program unless Scrivener itself is working.

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Well, we’ve already outlived one license provider, so there’s that.

Nothing lasts forever, but we certainly don’t see any looming issues on the horizon.

In the event, though, I would anticipate that we would do something like issue a final license-free release. That’s what we did with Mac Scrivener 2.9, which was orphaned by the demise of our former license provider. (Paddle’s frameworks wouldn’t work with its 32-bit code.)

And of course we always recommend having reliable backups of important data. If you want to protect yourself against the demise of Scrivener itself, one alternative would be regular use of the Export function, which can replicate the structure of a project. You would lose Scrivener’s metadata, but not the files themselves.

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