If you read your software EULA (End User License Agreement) you definitely do not own it. You are buying a license to use it. The software company retains ownership.
That's true ... but so far, no company I know of has imposed restrictions on how long a licensee retains full functionality of 'purchased' software. The licensee can continue using it for years and years as long as it still runs under newer operating systems and with newer hardware.
Whether you pay a large one-time fee to use the software or whether you pay a small monthly fee to use the software, the actual ownership of the software is exactly the same.
The ownership is the same, but the control over the software is not the same. For example, if a licensee stops paying the monthly subscription cost for Lightroom, certain features of the program become disabled
permanently.
I much prefer to pay a small pittance to subscribe and always have all camera and software updates included.
That pittance turns into a lot of money over time ... and if the program is Lightroom or something similar, you might be locked into the subscription for your lifetime (which is of course the implicit goal of a subscription model) if you want full functionality to continue. Depending on actual costs, I much prefer to pay a reasonable price for a program
once and use it for as long as I choose to use it without updates. (I personally don't have any software subscriptions and I don't use any version of Lightroom. Others, of course, have different priorities and requirements.)
