Thanks Leo, that is reassuring. I suppose the only outstanding question is about security fixes. In the rare instances when they are needed, can you commit to not charging for them?
That would depend on so many factors (type of issue, how old the versions are, etc.) that it’s impossible to answer generally.
We do occasionally put out updates for older versions after a new one is out, but it’s rare that it is even needed.
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I came to thank you for the free upgrade, I bought it more or less 3 months before the beta was announced.
The support and program are amazing, and the community is on par too. I don't know what you believe, but I affectionately and personally wish that Jesus bless your lives and your work, we need more people like this 
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I also only recently (October 2023) discovered Dopus and share your thoughts entirely. I had been using a long defunct program called UltraExplorer and despaired at finding anything better. Opus has many similarities to UltraExplorer but has taken functionality and customization to a far higher level.
I upgraded to Opus 13 and it was free.
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Will we be receiving an email to formally announce all the official details, etc, etc?
I just stumbled on the end of this thread by accident.
Emails will be going out, just not yet. See the "Soft Launch" part of Directory Opus 13 Now Available!
Thanks Leo. I just decided to go ahead an upgrade now.
Undoubtedly a stupid question but... Can I (eventually in a few weeks) upgrade one of our machines, spend some time tweaking everything and then, once satisfied, move on to the next upgrade. My certificate says '3 licenses'.
Thanks for everything and good luck with the v13 'birthing period'! 
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Awesome. Thanks!
Yes, absolutely. You can upgrade one machine to 13 and leave the others as they are on 12 for as long as you need. That includes re-installs and moving a licence to a new machine. A licence for Opus also works with older versions, so an Opus 13 licence will let you install anything all the way back to Opus 8 or 9, if I remember correctly.
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That's good to know. I saved my Opus 12 cert and 12.33 just in case. Glad to know I can use my new cert! Not that I want to downgrade. I ran the beta since the minute it was announced.
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Yes subscription is best for us. Why would you want to own something outright when you can just continually pay for it throughout your lifetime????? Why would you want to use one commander that's completely free when you can pay a yearly subscription for opus????? I mean Microsoft Apple Google Etcetera Etcetera all do it why not opus?
You are owning it outright, that doesn't change whatsoever with version 13. You only need to pay once if you want, just like with any previous version, then use it for the rest of time without paying again.
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- you never "own" any software... you just bought a license to use it
- this is an update-subscription, so in regard to "owning" the DOpus version you have bought, there is no change
I’d love to know about this, Leo. Thanks in advance.
My understanding is you'll always be eligible for a discount on upgrading from 12->13, but the current deal where people upgrading get 2 years of free updates afterwards will revert to the normal 1 year at some point, since that is a bonus for people upgrading now.
I imagine that deal will still be there in a month, but I don't know if it'll be the same in 6 months.
Sales/pricing are not my department, so if you want a more definitive answer, please email sales@gpsoft.com.au
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If you can escape the concrete jungle of New York City I'll show you why.
It will take much work and effort though.
Yeah, west to east, it starts near the Patriots stadium.
To me $1500-2000 USD per month to rent a shack of home is a bad investment.
My sister lived near White Plains before she died in 2017.
My niece is still in the area but now in Rhode Island for the while attending college.
The issue is the warranty. In the UK everything has a statutory warranty, a time during which you can expect the manufacturer to fix defects that were due to design or manufacturing. Furthermore, things must last a "reasonable length of time", which varies depending on the thing and is somewhat unclear for software.
In other words, if you buy software, it has to work for the intended task, and not fail in a way that makes it unusable such as being vulnerable to known security exploits.
That's one of the reasons why companies doing subscriptions often make the software stop working if you stop paying. Otherwise you could force them to support the last version you had.
And that's my concern here. It's quit likely that if you stop paying, at some point it will be a case of pay to have bugs fixed or live with them, and that's probably not compatible with UK consumer law.
One possible fix would be to offer LTS (Long Term Support) versions, with subscriptions running up to the next LTS release. The LTS doesn't get any feature updates, but any security issues and major bugs get fixed. It probably wouldn't get compatibility updates, if Windows broke something.
This may increase the work of developers, and it may be better to extend the subscription period.
I have purchased a new license and I may upgrade my current license. 
You're mixing up several things, like consumer protection acts on hardware and software, reasons for businesses to offer subscription plans that at most are excuses they use to keep people subscribed, or that LTS in most cases is for compatibility instead of security.
There is no such warranty for software except for a money back guarantee in some places, which is offered. Some try to interpret hardware laws as such and then come to the conclusion it can't work, that at very most companies would need to let customers know about security flaws but don't actually have to provide fixes for free, and it wouldn't exceed 1 year of updates included here regardless.
So it's not a problem, no matter how much one would try to create one. On top of that, there are trials and actual ways Opus can be used for free that even the devs have openly endorsed (albeit really quite annoying to have to keep using those), which makes it even less of an issue.
In the UK the law doesn't differentiate between hardware and software. The same rules apply to both. Fit for purpose, lasts a reasonable length of time, defects present during manufacturing to be corrected for free or refunded.
The only real question is determining how long software should reasonably last. For things like TVs and computers, case law has established 6 years as reasonable. Obviously if it's tax software applicable to only one year, then it might be as little as 1 year.
I've used the law before. Long ago I had a translation dictionary app for my phone that stopped working after a couple of years, and they didn't want to fix it because their licence for the dictionary expired. They ended up refunding that one, although legally they could have offered a partial refund based on two years use.
I'd really rather avoid all that though, and just have a clear policy and LTS version with a fixed cut-off date, say 5 years from the date of release. Hopefully it will never need to be updated anyway.