Increasing registration count not possible without active maintenance support

[FredS 140]

45 minutes ago, Vincent Parrett said:

you MUST offer deactivation or a means to move licenses

Not sure, thought that exists..
However there is no way to deactivate after a crash.

 

Either way, what you owned yesterday is today only a rental.. and at the mercy of a 'rude' renewal department at that..

 

[Vincent Parrett 852]

31 minutes ago, FredS said:

Not sure, thought that exists..
However there is no way to deactivate after a crash.

AFAIK there's no way to deactivate or deregister an install.

[Alan Chate 5]

Had thought this may come at some time so now only have one legacy app running in Delphi. Realise it is not practical for many of you but I have ported newer apps to Lazarus / mORMot. Not as elegant, or feature rich as Delphi, but works for me and there are no licencing issues. 

Feel comfortable with that decision now Idera have made this announcement.

[Dave Nottage 624]

From Atanas' message:

 

"We realize this is a change to previous operations and to reduce the impact to development projects, we issued a one-time registration limit increase for all customers who are close to hitting their registration count limit. This should address issues with re-installs of your licensed software on existing or new machines. Further, we will continue to look for options to make this more seamless through automation."

 

That means you should have received a bump. If you haven't received one, please contact EMBT. Unfortunately I don't have a direct contact point at the moment for this issue.

[Vincent Parrett 852]

"One time" so I get to install one more time and then I'm up shit creek? 

[Alan Chate 5]

Wonder if this is in contravention of Australian consumer laws?

[Vincent Parrett 852]

Most likely, but IANAL. 

[Alexander Elagin 143]

From the same Atanas Popov's article:

"Our objective is to make staying on Update Subscription a “no brainer.” "

Currently staying on Update Subscription is a nightmare. While with any other software product it is usually a matter of pressing a "Renew" link on a web page and entering card detail, the last time I tried to renew the Delphi subscription it was a ten days long process with a busy email exchange and even a phone call (!). Not to mention that the renewal price is not published anywhere and the renewal itself involves asking for a quote. Looks like Emb is not interested in Update Subscription customers, too. If only I was wise enough to avoid using custom attributes, generics and anon functions in the code, I'd happily move my 2M+ lines core codebase to Lazarus, but alas currently this is not possible. But lesson learnt.

[Uwe Raabe 2166]

See my comment to Atanas: 

https://community.idera.com/developer-tools/b/blog/posts/from-the-gm-new-updates-and-changes-to-the-registration-bumps-policy?CommentId=7816b564-c240-4ad1-ad95-a79bdacd479c

[haentschman 92]

@Uwe Raabe

... it could be so easy.

Edited May 23, 2019 by haentschman

[David Heffernan 2457]

Antagonising your customers and making them hate you is never a good business plan. 

[Sherlock 685]

Just now, David Heffernan said:

Antagonising your customers and making them hate you is never a good business plan. 

Somebody was bound to try it anyway.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Alexander Elagin said:

While with any other software product it is usually a matter of pressing a "Renew" link on a web page and entering card detail

Yes, but that would include you have some developers at the hand and a development tool.

 

Maybe Emba did not know any developer nor any developer tool, maybe

[Edwin Yip 154]

13 hours ago, Alan Chate said:

Had thought this may come at some time so now only have one legacy app running in Delphi. Realise it is not practical for many of you but I have ported newer apps to Lazarus / mORMot. Not as elegant, or feature rich as Delphi, but works for me and there are no licencing issues. 

Feel comfortable with that decision now Idera have made this announcement.

I fully agree with you, especially with the recent Huawei ban event. It's really dangerous to put all your eggs in a single place.

 

I followed some of the Hacker News discussion on that event, one of the impressive comments was by an European entrepreneur, basically he raised a question - If a government uses its corporate as its arm to punish a foreign company, well, that made he rethink his strategy as to building a company that's completely reply on tech companies from that country.

 

I'm still using Delphi for my projects, but I try to be as much prepared for Lazarus migration as possible.

Edited May 23, 2019 by edwinyzh

[FredS 140]

9 hours ago, Vincent Parrett said:

AFAIK there's no way to deactivate or deregister an install.

 

Got that confused with IBExpert which has that feature and a fixed price for reactivation after your subscription elapses..

[WillH 33]

34 minutes ago, FredS said:

 

Got that confused with IBExpert which has that feature and a fixed price for reactivation after your subscription elapses..

IBExpert is another company with a registration procedure that is excessively restrictive to use. It is also inaccurate and takes some time to get the problems sorted out.

 

That said IBExpert is a superb product that I use every day. So I'll put up with their registration procedure. I always wish they would change it though.

 

Another excellent product I use a lot is Beyond compare by Scooter Software. They have product quality and their licensing/registration sorted. Just shows that it can be done.

[FredS 140]

8 minutes ago, WillH said:

registration procedure that is excessively restrictive to use

 

No argument there, but at least you can 'unregister' and move without problems, if you crash you can get it up for a fixed fee.

Checking this ability in the Delphi License Manager this morning showed the mess that is, plus I didn't see a place where it shows how many activations you have left either which means that the only time you find that out is after digging yourself out of a crash situation.

 

[WillH 33]

5 minutes ago, FredS said:

 

No argument there, but at least you can 'unregister' and move without problems, if you crash you can get it up for a fixed fee.

Checking this ability in the Delphi License Manager this morning showed the mess that is, plus I didn't see a place where it shows how many activations you have left either which means that the only time you find that out is after digging yourself out of a crash situation.

 

  That is true, you can see the remaining activations on the IBExpert site which already makes it much better than Embas offering. However, the unregister process is a manual one involving email. So I have in the past had to wait a day or two over a public holiday for that to come through. I've also been in a situation where machines have taken multiple registrations. Getting that sorted out took a couple of attempts (mainly around convincing the support staff there was a problem.). I didn't know about the fixed fee to get the activation going again, good to know. IBExpert is now being sold as subscription only software so at least we know where we stand with it.

 

  Delphi has always had a terrible solution where it comes to activation. Their web site is a mess and as you say does not give any information as to how many activations you have left. It's like Russian roulette every time you need to re-install for whatever reason.

 

 

[Joseph MItzen 257]

Bump Me Delphi One More Time

(Sung to the tune of Baby One More Time)

 

Oh Delphi, Delphi
Oh Delphi, Delphi
Oh Delphi, Delphi how was I supposed to know
That something wasn't right here
Oh Delphi, Delphi I shouldn't have nuked Windows
And now you're out of sight, yeah
Show me how to contact Team B
Tell me Delphi 'cause I need to use Project Jedi
Your installing is killing me (and I)
I must confess I need a bump (need a bump)
Using EDN I lose my mind
I'm in a bind
Bump me Delphi one more time
Oh Delphi, Delphi
The reason I reinstall?
The IDE is locked up
Oh 'spensive Delphi
There's nothing that I wouldn't pay
To get out of this cock-up
Show me where to send the money
Tell me Delphi 'cause I need to compile, all because
Your policies are killing me (and I)
I must confess I now believe (now believe)
Dropping my subscription wasn't fine
Here's dollar signs
Bump me Delphi one more time
Oh Delphi, Delphi
Oh Delphi, Delphi
Yeah,
Oh Delphi, Delphi how was I supposed to know
Oh 'spensive Delphi, that Popov needed the dough
I must confess, that Oxygene is looking so good now
Don't you know I still believe
That I'm screwed and how
EDN be kind
Bump me Popov one more time
Your Code Insight is killing me (and I)
I must confess I still believe (still believe)
One more squiggly line I'll lose my mind
VS' looking fine
Bump me Delphi one more time
I must confess, that your buggy mess is killing me now
Don't you know I'm still locked in
I see with clarity
Can't wait til FPC reaches feature parity
Bump me Delphi one last time

[Rollo62 595]

It should have some visual impression too ...

If Delphi is like that, maybe I can forgive

Edited May 24, 2019 by Rollo62

[RonaldK 18]

On 5/23/2019 at 6:06 AM, Alan Chate said:

Wonder if this is in contravention of Australian consumer laws?

Is there any country in the world, where you can change the rules of using, after you have bought it?

 

[FredS 140]

40 minutes ago, RonaldK said:

after you have bought it

Breaking agreements is the 'New Order'..

 

That is then backed up with insane logic.
The customer bought Delphi and the Vendor (to protect their asset) added Copy Protection, now the Customer is held accountable to maintain this..

 

Oh Orwell..

[Sherlock 685]

On 5/31/2019 at 4:10 PM, RonaldK said:

Is there any country in the world, where you can change the rules of using, after you have bought it?

 

I'm guessing... the USA? It's the origin of this silly action, isn't it?

[Mike Margerum 16]

Im building a new app that's based on a similar app i've already built in Delphi.  No way i'm using Delphi now.  I just renewed my maintenance and will make every attempt in the next 12 months to make sure I don't have to renew again.  This is just acting in bad faith.  I hate to say it but Stallman was right about a lot of things.  I'm building this new app on top of open source components.  I'll help contribute if I can, but im not using anymore commercial development tools.  Except for Xcode because I dont have much choice there.

[Rollo62 595]

16 minutes ago, Mike Margerum said:

Im building a new app that's based on a similar app i've already built in Delphi.  No way i'm using Delphi now.  I just renewed my maintenance and will make every attempt in the next 12 months to make sure I don't have to renew again.  This is just acting in bad faith.  I hate to say it but Stallman was right about a lot of things.  I'm building this new app on top of open source components.  I'll help contribute if I can, but im not using anymore commercial development tools.  Except for Xcode because I dont have much choice there.

I'm a big fan of free and open source software too, and actually try to build my infrastructure around it, if possible.

Building up a community is a great thing, when looking to Apple, Google and Microsoft, but also hard and costly promotional work usually.

 

But to be fair, those big communities might get back-supported by return on investment from other products, like hardware, search engines, whatever.

For a company living from pure IDE and frameworks alone its much harder to find reasonable ROI, so far I can understand Embarcadero's mindset.

 

Example for such similar companies are maybe IDEA, RemObjects, which also have to sell their software for a living.
In contrast to Embarcadero they seem to manage their community growing well, probably by avoiding launching new, scaring actions of their company management
all the time.

The only value of all these IDE related companies lay in  their loyal COMMUNITY, not in their products itself, when will Embarcadero ever understand that simple fact ?