Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Esak" <john at valar.com>
To: "Filepro-List at Lists. Celestial. Com" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 11:23 AM
Subject: RE: Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash


>
>> Even if there was a way for me to self-generate a temporary working
>> license
>> or if the license went into a grace period mode automatically to get
>> through
>> situations like that, I still can't allow myself to depend on something
>> that
>> will occasionally stop working and requires someone else to fix. Two
>
> filePro's license manager *does* have a fail-over backup provision.
>
>> except hope I don't absolutely need filepro anymore by that time. Since
>> that
>> would be a huge undertaking (we've all heard the 5 million dollar failed
>> fp
>> oracle migration lawsuit story), I had better start now and work hard at
>> it as much as possible.
>
> Unfortunately, no one can explain why you feel and think the way you do.
> Your words don't say anything about why, and believe me, no one cares. 
> What
> they always do say is how brilliant and great you are that you and Aljex
> were able to find ways to run programs that don't cost anything. Good 
> work.
>
> It is filePro that put Aljex into business, period. It is filePro that is
> *keeping* it there no matter what stupid bullsh*t you want to spew. Who 
> the
> hell do you think you're kidding? FilePro and FacetWin from FacetCorp... 
> are
> what put Aljex where it is today... wherever that is. To hear you talk, it
> was you and your new hacking. Sure... what a joke.
>
>> For every one of me who speaks up like this, how many do you suppose are
>> thinking and doing the same thing quietly? Hint, facetwin and vsifax and
>> sco
>> and doublevision never heard a complaint like this from me. Like most
>
> Hint: That is because you didn't want to pay for what their products are
> worth anymore. Good one, so companies that provide really good products 
> and
> service to you don't deserve anyone's business any more?  They don't 
> deserve
> any feedback, huh? You would be lying if you try to tell people that the
> support folks at FacetCorp never helped you learn what the hell you were
> doing. You would be lying through your teeth. Without any question, their
> product and support is without blemish. They did nothing but help Aljex...
> and *you* get to the point where you could dump them. Good one. I guess by
> this you're saying Aljex wouldn't care if their customers treated you the
> same way. Let me see. On this filePro list, why don't I put up a list of 
> all
> the companies that provide the same service Aljex does (or better) for 
> less
> money. Aljex sucks for charging what they do, right? What nerve Aljex has,
> expecting clients to pay such high $$$ for a product that can be gotten
> elsewhere so cheaply and *without* those pesky licensing agreements
> attached.
>
> BackupEDGE has kept Aljex's data safe in the same way. Again they deserve 
> no
> credit for your brilliance? I suppose you've never upgraded a server 
> without
> relying on them either, huh? More bull, more shading of the truth. Oh but
> then, I forgot, you've learned everything you know without anyone's help.
> You are really too much. Aljex is certainly lucky to have you hacking out
> free software for them.
>
>> products and they protected themselves to death. Granted, you're in a
>
> Okay, so I can now tell everyone that Aljex doesn't protect their package
> and there is no licensing fee, or business agreement required to use your
> stuff. Great, I'll send the hackers your way. You should get along well
> them. You have the same mentality.
>
>> several orders of magnitude more difficult to replace a database engine
>> and
>> programming language. But that just means it takes longer, not that it's
>> not
>> possible or that the same incentives and logic don't apply.
>
> So, have you mailed all this to Howie and Sue. They better sharpen up 
> their
> *other* database skills, huh? When exactly will you be firing them? This
> I've got to see. Do me and all of us a favor Brian, send us all a note the
> day your brilliance cobbles together "White's HylaPro" to take filePro's
> place. I'll tell you what, the day Aljex stops using filePro. If it is any
> time within the next year let's say. I will publicly retract that I think
> you are full of crap. Until then, you keep proving it with just about 
> every
> self-serving useless thing you write.
>
> John Esak

Addressing basically every one of your "points"

1) actually I said exactly the opposite, that I was never on such a pogrom 
and what I was saying was that this is what naturally happens if the forces 
push that way, even gently. It really doesn't matter if you or anyone else 
likes the personality of the people doing it, or if you beleive or agree 
with their motives, it simply is what happens.

2) Gee I like the folx at facetwin too. but lets see:
4 or 5 years ago I informed them of a problem, a show-stopper problem at 
least for  the end user. Internet connected users were getting disconnected 
from their sessions after being only a minute or so idle. Way too short for 
a user to use as their main app all day. The fix is simple and most every 
other terminal emulator has had it for years before that. keepalives. The 
server daemon or the terminal client needs to send some null traffic along 
the session to keep the tcp session from looking idle to ISP's and other 
routers that might be outside my or the end users control.
THIS YEAR, mere months ago, they finally added this feature.
I am supposed to just sit there and lose 50% of my customers for 5 years?
Luckily, I, unlike facetwin, respond quicker to my customers needs and 
started solving that problem by a few different means. We installed Anzio 
some places, we installed Putty some places, we used a background shell 
script to send nulls from the server side which allowed facetwin to work.

I have a few servers that, for no reason we can tell, all the facetwin 
licenses break every time I sneeze in the server room. They are starting to 
not sound so friendly on the phone when I call to get them fixed, because 
they have no real way to know that I'm not just cloning a new box, but they 
do know that the same licences have been renewed many times. So here I am, 
paid anywhere from $110 to $199 per seat for a bunch of simple terminal 
emulator seats, the most you can possibly pay anywhere for that 
functionality, getting not-quite-yet-outloud accused of stealing, and having 
to suffer the outtage and the users screaming... I am supposed to thank 
someone for this?

Linda told me once that they actually had to start charging for the labor of 
license updates for some of their larger customers that have a lot of seats 
and have to move boxes and users around regularly. Incredible! just TRY to 
tell me I need to pay you more to support the labor of keeping some 
arbitrary artificial licence manager working! Talk about no value to the 
customer! I should charge THEM for the overhead it costs ME! Incredible.

"facetwin has told you how to do your job..."
Mmmm no, sorry.
One little example, facetwin actually did have a crude version of that 
keepalive shell script some time between when I asked for a solution and 
today, I don't know how long ago it appeared but it wasn't there when I came 
to them looking for a solution, and far from them telling me how to solve 
problems, their script is extremely crude whereas I not only wrote 
essentially the same thing on my own but one that works much better.
Theirs would allow dozens (or any number) of simultaneous copies of itself 
to be started up on the same tty, theirs would not always exit when the 
parent session closed, causing many instances to accumulate over time in the 
background as headless processes, eventually choking off the process stack, 
theirs didn't try to limit itself to only running on a facetwin session, 
which is the only kind of session that needs it. Theirs brokenly assumed 
that the shell's echo honors backslash codes by default, which is not true 
most of the time outside of sco.
Their tech support has been pretty excellent as far as supporting their 
product. But I don't recall ever having them tell me how to do anything that 
wasn't strictly part of their own product and squarely within their 
responsibility, and anything that was of any use outside of that. When I 
first encountered them, I did not for example know how to share a directory, 
share a printer, install a windows shared printer as a unix printer etc... 
but these are all strictly facetwin things that they necessarily have to 
tell me how to do at least once. (and that IS the case, I never had to call 
them for the same problem twice, once I'd been through the few common tasks 
once, it was just license renewals after that.) I did know all the 
surrounding OS and did know how to do all of those same things, and 
diagnose, and correct problems with them, on the same OS and others, using 
VisionFS and Samba. Including compiling Samba on SCO to even get it in the 
first place. No, I have had vendors educate me on a few rare occasions, but 
facetwin has never happened to be one of them. This is not a complaint, 
merely a response to your charge that I owe them anything.

I've mostly spoken with Jim, Tre, and Linda (I think 2 Lindas) and I mean it 
when I say I really like them all. But thats just not enough justification 
to suffer a product that doesn't do what I need or or hits me with 
difficulties, overhead, and limitations that are avoidable.

3) Actually, Howie is leading the pack over here wrt programming in other 
languages. The rest of us can't hardly spell javascript, meanwhile Howie is 
writing whole apps in it. (not just js, but the whole web-based melange of 
things, in which for better or for worse, like it or not, js features 
heavily, ala "ajax")

4) We already tell customers that they have full access to the source. It's 
a _selling point_. Actually, thanks to the new system, there is now one 
significant assurance we can no longer make as a selling point. Thanks for 
that fP.
Although we now offer a service more often than software itself, we still 
offer it for the same terms as before, and most customers just voluntarily 
opt for the subscription, which does not give them any software or source. 
In fact, some have done both, bought the full traditional server and 
software and copies of all the ususal add-ons like vsifax etc... and then 
subscribed on top of that. They are paying for and getting a constant stream 
of software improvements.
But they don't have to. We are perfectly happy to sell them a packaged box 
that they can then use as-is for as long as they want, modify it, transfer 
it to ever more new boxes as old ones die, copy to clone boxes for 
redundancy, copy to clone boxes for the sake of splitting the same number of 
users across multiple boxes, if they have the ability we don't care if they 
never call us for example to perform a server upgrade the way fP now 
requires you to get your license fixed. It's outside the agreement the 
customer has to sign to copy the software or add a significant fraction of 
new users, but we don't do anything to break it, nor spend _any_ resources 
hunting such possible breaches down. If we encounter an abuse naturally say 
in the course of doing some programming work or sys admin, we don't shut 
anything down we just tell the owner, who usually wasn't aware and has no 
problem paying. But all along, nothing is ever broken. Unless the 
discrepency is major we usually don;t even bother saying anything, or even 
noticing in the first place. With the subscription service it is admittedly 
stricter, If someone doesn't pay for a while, and doesn't even ask for any 
kind of help or leeway or offer explaination of a problem they are dealing 
with, then eventually we disable the account. But that new deal was not 
inflicted on anyone and anyone is always free to use the old model of 
buy/lease their own system and never need to talk to us again.

My point was so the opposite of everything you said John. What I'm saying is 
"Right now (as of 5.0.14) I don't need or even _want_ to look at anything 
else. And bear in mind, this is despite filepros very significant 
limitations and inconveniences in integrating with the rest of  todays 
software world. Please don't make me want to look. It would be a huge job I 
don't want to do."

It sounds now like the license arrangements are workable, as long as fp is 
around and continues to provide licence fixes according to the same deal. 
But why should I assume that? They are changing the deal right now? So why 
not again later? And as I pointed out, it's kind of dumb to actually rely on 
any such promises since by now we've all seen companies dissappear or change 
leaving users stranded several times, so, after seeing that, what kind of 
idiot continues not to allow for, or at least worry about the possibility?

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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