Why?

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 03:57:30PM -0400, Walter Vaughan wrote:
> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> <snip>
> > If I build an app, and I deploy a couple hundred copies on a given
> > point release of filePro, and test it six ways to Sunday over hundreds
> > of hours of labor...
> > 
> > and then you tell me that I am *required* to upgrade the engine
> > gratuitously.
> 
> I don't know why I am jumping in here, everyone can fight their own 
> battles...
> 
> But if all of a sudden you had problems with 5.0.09, wouldn't it be 
> incumbent upon you to test with a 5.0.13 version to see if that fixed 
> the problem? I see well over a hundred things fixed between those 
> versions, some pretty major.

It is a rough situation, certainly.  But the vendor holding a gun to
your head and saying "we will not even talk to you unless you upgrade"
is the specific aspect I'm talking about.

"That has been found and fixed in $NEWER_RELEASE" is, of course, a
different matter.

Where this *really* gets hairy is when, for example 4.8 to 5.0 (or even
4.5 to 5.0) costs $BIGBUCKS, and they won't support you on the last
point release of that older version -- I don't precisely recall
fPtech's policy here, but I think it's that they will support 4.8.$LAST
and no 4.5's at all.  I still have clients happily purring away on 4.5,
in at least one case on RedHat 5.2.

Aw, damn; no, wait; I just upgraded them last month.  :)

> The unsaid issue here is that for Win32 native users, you need to 
> license filePro to a specific hard drive volume ID. Not a problem if you 
> have a one2one relationship between paid versions and installations. 
> Problematic if you try and run fp on a computer and you don't have an 
> activation key that that matches your hard disk's current volume ID. I 
> believe 5.0.09 did not require that type of activation for Win32 users, 
> which may be the reason for some to not move past that release point.

Indeed.  Which means that you're holding your *developer* clients
hostage over your licensing policy at the gunpoint of your support
department.

Not the best way to encourage developers.

Definitely a good reason to deploy on Linux rather than Windoze, though.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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