> That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case?
It wasn't even obvious that the personal account existed in the first place; if the app store "just works" and the former designated Macintosh user doesn't care about software updates too much, forgetting that the account was necessary and it should have been either handed over to posterity or purged by uninstalling the involved apps is a reasonable outcome.
The way Apple handles this sucks. It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible. It would be nice if there was an easy way to merge obsolete/outdated accounts in to a valid one.
> It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible.
I agree, but there are at least a few clear reasons I can imagine why Apple don’t want this:
1. They don’t want people to resell software that they bought.
2. If you could transfer licenses, a group of many people could share a single license between them, transferring it back and forth. Instead of all of them buying one license each.
3. If licenses could be transferred there would for sure be cases of scammers tricking people to transfer their licenses for paid software to them.
I used to think so, but it gets difficult with DRMed digital downloads.
For example, I owned a piece of hardware called Akai MPC X. It came with a companion software for the computer, a DAW called “MPC2 Software”.
When I sold the hardware Akai MPC X to someone else, I wanted to transfer the companion software for the computer to them. Akai demanded a ridiculous €100 fee to transfer the license for the software from my user to their user. I had other software on my user as well, so me handing over the user as whole was not an option and therefore only Akai could have helped us transfer the license.
In the end the buyer of the hardware therefore got only the hardware and not the companion software for computer.
That experience soured my opinion of Akai by a lot.
The MPC X is still nice hardware and I kind of want to buy an MPC X again in the future. But it sucks that Akai is like this with the software license.
It wasn't even obvious that the personal account existed in the first place; if the app store "just works" and the former designated Macintosh user doesn't care about software updates too much, forgetting that the account was necessary and it should have been either handed over to posterity or purged by uninstalling the involved apps is a reasonable outcome.