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On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 05:55:25PM -0400, Kenneth Brody thus spoke:
> [...]
> >As I have made quite apparent, many people are averse to upgrading past
> >5.0.14 -anyway-, so reporting the bugs is pointless for those people to do,
> >and has been for years.
> 
> And yet, here it is, over a decade later, and you are complaining
> that these (possibly never-reported) bugs are still there.

What's their incentive to report the bugs, when the only thing they're told
is essentially, "Fork over more money for the fix, or get bent?"  You won't
offer them anything they feel is a viable solution, and they know it.
What's the point in their saying a word?

> And if anything after 5.0.14 is "pointless" for you, then what
> difference would it make if fPTech were to go back and fix any of
> these in a 5.0.16 release?  Or would you insist that they get fixed
> in a 5.0.14b version?

5.0.16 would be fine, as long as they're not forced to endure the license
manager, which is the main reason you have a bunch of installations
suffering 5.0.14 bugs instead of running 5.0.15.

My ideal solution would be to admit that 5.0.15 stealthing in the LM was
a mistake, and provide them with one clean, LM-free, final version of
5.0.x, no matter what the version number.  

It's not the .15 itself which is inherently bad; it's the unwanted extra
crap bundled into it that people object to.  That you don't seem to
get that speaks to tone deafness.  Read some of Brian White's and Jay
Ashworth's posts on the matter in the past.  It's not just me, and it's not
even just them.  There's seriously nothing new I can say on the subject if
you don't get it by now.

I have to say that it's also disconcerting watching companies needing to
bump their seat counts, and seeing them hit a brick wall.  They don't
want/need a new version; they need/want more seats.  TTBOMK, you folks
won't sell them binaries to extend their seat counts for 5.0.14, and
haven't done for years.  If I recall correctly, it's a matter of public
record via an archived post or several.  I know places which have 5.0.14
-and- 5.6 or 5.7 licenses, and the later versions were purchased with the
intent of upgrading, but haven't been deployed some years on for production
because there are so many headaches with the transition from 5.0 forward.
These people are/were willing to pay perfectly good money for fresh,
LM-free binaries with the appropriate user counts they need, but you're
forcing them to suffer a transition that, in many cases, is ill-advised
and extremely difficult to coordinate within an always-on enterprise
environment.  So they now own versions they can't even use in practicality,
and are -still- having to work around not having enough seats.  They paid a
lot for a solution which solved nothing for them.

And it's not just my clients.  There are people I don't even deal with who
have posted to the list and asked about getting 5.0.14, and they're even
willing to -pay- to stay there.  I know that we've seen it multiple times.
I've seen it for user seat bumps, and I've seen it in the case where they
have 5.0.8 or something, and they have been told they're S.O.L. unless they
want to get the latest.  Technically, they should be entitled to anything
between 5.0.0 and 5.0.15, inclusive.  Especially if they're asking for
(at worst) a recompile, and are willing to pay to do that, rather than to
upgrade.

But hey, it's your customers and potential customers that you're
irritating.  I can't imagine how you feel this encourages anyone to still
deal with the company once they've seen how readily they're burned, though.
Why do you think I was doing my own due diligence regarding updates for a
potential personal purchase?  I've seen plenty of people get burned, and
I'm not willingly walking into that situation myself.  I'd hoped things had
improved, but I'm not pleased with my findings.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.