Deleting RAD Studio Licences

[TWinAPI 0]

Good day All,

First post on this forum, so please forgive me if this isn't the right place for it.

The problem I have is with Embarcadero's product licensing, which seems to allow up to three installation instances.  On one PC (my main work machine) I have two installations, namely Delphi 10.4.2 and 11.0.  The third installation (Delphi 11.0) is on a separate laptop that is mostly being used by a colleague who wants to learn Delphi.  These three installations seems to have filled the licensing quota of three, since I tried to install Delphi 11 on a new PC but the serial number was rejected.  The new PC will replace my old one (which is over six years old at this stage).

I approached Embarcadero technical support with a request for an additional registration slot for the serial number I have, explaining that it's for a previous version of Delphi (i.e., not the latest one, 12.3) to run on a new PC where the old machine would be repurposed after its SSD had been wiped.  My request was rejected because I don't have an active support and maintenance agreement in place.  I'm not sure the tech support dude understood that I was happy to lose the use of Delphi on the old PC.

 

I fired up the Embarcadero License Manager app (see attached screenshot) in the hope that there was a way to transfer or deactivate the registration on the old PC so that I would be able to use the same serial number again for a fresh Delphi 11.0 installation on the new PC, but the closest thing I found is "Delete...", which doesn't seem to be correct.

So, my main question is simply this:  If I delete the existing licence from my old PC, will this free up the serial number so that I can use it on the new PC?  Or will it remain unusable?

 

Any help or suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Cheers!

Edited April 30 by TWinAPI
Fixups.

[Uwe Raabe 2138]

35 minutes ago, TWinAPI said:

So, my main question is simply this:  If I delete the existing licence from my old PC, will this free up the serial number so that I can use it on the new PC?  Or will it remain unusable?

No, unfortunately that won't help. Although you remove the license from that PC, you won't get a registration bump with that.

 

The key for getting a bump without active subscription lies here:

37 minutes ago, TWinAPI said:

I approached Embarcadero technical support with a request for an additional registration slot for the serial number I have

While the technical support is the right place with an active subscription, you should contact your local Embarcadero Sales representative for a bump when your subscription ran out.

[TWinAPI 0]

Thanks for the reply.  Basically, bad news for me, then.
 

2 minutes ago, Uwe Raabe said:

While the technical support is the right place with an active subscription, you should contact your local Embarcadero Sales representative for a bump when your subscription ran out.

Well, as I said, my request was declined because I don't have an active support and maintenance agreement in place.  When I bought the product in June 2021, I did so online and dealt directly with cleverbridge AG (in Köln, Germany), and me being located in South Africa, I don't have any local Embarcadero sales representative. ☹️

Cheers!

[Uwe Raabe 2138]

You may even try to contact sales online: https://www.embarcadero.com/company/contact-sales

6 minutes ago, TWinAPI said:

Well, as I said, my request was declined because I don't have an active support and maintenance agreement in place.

If you've got that decline by email, check if it contains some phrase that you should contact sales instead.

 

OK, they might try to sell you an update, new license or something similar, but you don't need that to get your registration counter bumped.

[MichaelT 9]

Contact Sales in U.K. or Germany and have your registration counter bumped. In general 2 or as you said 3 installations by default was retrieved from experience these days about 10 years ago ore more.

 

I'd rather be careful. Buying an additional license or 'replacing' the one actively used will not help to bump the license count. So waiting and buying an 'additional' license doesn't help.  Not buying a service level agreement and/or too many licenses of the same just drive's EMB's business and the user insane. Enterprise development tools run on desktop PCs. Running Delphi on a laptop/notebook is not about sanity, it's about glory.

 

The biggest issue nowadays is the lifetime of the battery of a laptop. I personally still run a 12 years old laptop without batteries (accumulator has been removed and the button cell is empty) and a good old Delphi 10.3.2 and 10.4.1 both with Client Server Add-On. So I prepared for the day I have to replace the laptop and ordered the SA about 4 or 5 years. Next year the SA will be gone and has to be renewed but the notebook/laptop is still there today. In fact 5 years Delphi Prof. SA discounted are affordable and available at an amount approximately of 1 year RAD Studio Enterprise. Just to put things into proportion. I'm a big fan of Delphi on one hand but a 1990s dinosaur too and 1990s dinosaurs enjoy C/C++ sill. But I personally don't need the latest language improvements and things like that, because I'm used to a decent C/C++ and not too sophisticated, an evolution of the language that took place over the last 10-15 years more or less.

 

On my stand by notebook I rund the RAD Studio Enterprise, but I would be happy if i could put the Delphi installation to my hard disk which is not the boot device but fast and big, since the notebook is a 6 year old gaming notebook (HP Omen/Alien). The boot device is fast as hell but of pretty small size.

 

Delphi and RAD Studio are Enterprise kind of tools and Professional is a cut down edition of an Enterprise Software. The idea of EMB these days simply was, well a) we have a desktop installation and b) maybe a notebook/laptop in a corporate environment. In such a scenario 3 installs per named are very likely sufficient for the vast majority of users or organizations known as customers. In general. If you have a computer with a second user you need an additional named license. Not talking about floating licenses. Since we very likely still pay for the housing bubble in San Francisco as part of the price tag for the Professional Edition very likely, and especially. EMB should bump up your counter. There is still a strong tendency and/or as a result of such a former day's legacy to force people to buy SAs for Enterprise SKUs and in particular the RAD/Studio Enterprise SKU.

 

I really follow the idea of one desktop PC with Delphi & Friends and that's it in general. Since the replacement/backup notebook has to be replaced too soon very likely holding the SA for additional 5 years or longer will bear fruit very likely.

 

Anything else is in virtualized boxes mostly on Linux and FPC/Lazarus. I personally limited the use of Delphi/RAD Studio to where it sill makes sense and honestly I 'pay'/'donate' for PyScripter (for example) in a first place.

 

Anything else is a matter of the exchange rate of the EURO vs. the US Dollar. For semi-professional users like me or hobbyists the whole bunch of Apple equipment for example and so on are the bigger issue. At the moment the times are getting better. The notebooks in the stores provide 32GB or RAM for business notebooks as well as just regular ones and the exchange rate is currently returning to acceptable levels. As mentioned before, im my case running RAD-Studio or Delphi is all about glory. The option to start a software development shop run by an owner here in Austria, apart from some well known exceptions strongly focused on local demands on green grass, most likely web applications, passed way already little longer than 15 years ago. The gap between having to invest first and the amount you get back in return from that money buys you lots of the latest Apple shit, cars, RAD Studio Enterprise licenses and SAs, desktop computers with as many displays connected one can put on the desk and so on .... and you still enjoy about 10 to 15 years not having to cope/bother with software development issues/problems as a professional or let's say active consultant. Such guys tend to prefer notebooks too.

 

Times will change and time will come, when all the glory will be gone. In practice hobby, semi-professional, training, educating people an so on is already very well covered with FPC/Lazarus nowadays no matter if on Linux, Apple or Windows. I cannot talk about professional software PC development with any customer but my self in mind, since that's something I successfully tried to avoid over the last 30 years. So my Delphi 'career' ended with the appearance of Delphi 1 but I'm still developing using Delphi but where it still fits.

 

They (EMB) should bump up your license count.

[TWinAPI 0]

Thanks, I came right with the licence after contacting Embarcadero Sales and explaining the issue to them.

I managed to get through the installation process without any apparent trouble but I could not create or open any projects.  Error "the required personality Delphi.Personality is unavailable" was always shown.  The Platform Manager under Tools showed no available or downloadable platforms, and the GetIt manager was equally blank.

I tried everything that came up in a Google search, mainly from Stack Overflow and this forum:  Uninstalling and reinstalling, restarting the PC a few times, starting Delphi 11 repeatedly with admin rights.

None of that helped.

So, in desperation, I copied the whole installation tree from the old PC (under "\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\22.0") as well as the public app data (under "\Users\Public\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio") to an external drive, and overwrote the installation on the new PC with it (because the installation paths are the same for the two PCs).  I omitted "\ProgramData\Embarcadero" because there's only licensing info there and the two folders' contents was identical between the two PCs.

Next, I exported from the old PC the entire registry keys "HKCU\SOFTWARE\Embarcadero", "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Embarcadero", "HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Embarcadero", plus a couple of CLSIDs, and then imported all of that into the new PC's registry.  (All of the file- and registry key write operations on the new PC require admin privileges.)

This finally got Delphi 11 going properly without any warnings or errors and I am now able to create and open projects, and to compile them.

Cheers!