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Comment by trome | Hacker News Reader

Damn, not even a decade of keeping their activation servers online by Autocad for their own software? That is ridiculous, it'd be like Microsoft shutting down their infrastructure for Windows 7 activations today.

I feel at a certain point, if you've sold software that calls home and you are unwilling to maintain the servers and there are still people using it, you should hand it off to the Internet Archive or a similar org so they can run it. Leaving users stranded with no hope of using software they're familiar with, have paid for, and have supported is just a bad move.

Moves like what Autocad did to you are why large companies are using libre software, if upstream dies for some reason, your business won't click off tomorrow.

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> Moves like what Autocad did to you are why large companies are using libre software

Ironically, this is also why some DON'T use libre software. They question what happens when the maintainers stop.

Being free to choose someone else to pay for maintenance work seems like a pretty good feature. Rejecting Free software on the basis that the original maintainer might stop seems like a veiled statement of unwillingness to actually pay for maintenance, not a statement about the viability of supporting Free software.

Someone should tell them, if you're worried about them stopping GIVE THEM MONEY.

And if nobody else does? Pay their whole salary? Even AutoCAD isn't that expensive.

There is software where a single yearly license costs more than someone's salary.

The problems with these servers though is typically isolated to hobby users who don't have the money to hire people to keep the ancient software working for them.

No, this isn't. If that was your worry you especially wouldn't use proprietary software where the issue is much more prevalent. As others point out, you could pay FOSS maintainers if you wanted to.

Instead, people who don't use X make up excuses as to why not, rather than simply saying they like Y. If you like AutoCAD, use it.

In taking customer feedback it's important to only ask potential customers, not people who'd never use your product anyways. Even if their feedback is honest it won't help with what you're doing.

Which is funny, because in the worst case they can continue the development of the software by themselves, which is virtually impossible with commercial software.

That sounds right, and your experience obviously gives you a negative experience of the manufacturer. But as an engineer in this situation I can relate. If we had phone-home activation I'd probably try to argue that it should be expiring re-enabled every year in the product so that if we abandoned it then users wouldn't be stranded.

The question I'd have to answer is - would this be a net positive? Would it lead to more or less sales? Would we only lose customers who wouldn't buy a new license anyway? What would the cost be of my proposed feature that helps customers in the future?

In our situation there is zero risk of e.g. losing business to open source, so management would likely be deligthted with the idea that users would not be running our old software. In reality we avoid the problem entirely by just selling subscriptions like so many others these days. The software has a kill switch that makes it unusable after the planned release date of version N+2.

Most license key activation systems can easily be run on a $20 VPS these days. There is literally no reason to not keep it running for 40+ years.

It seems like this would be easily defeated by a firewall, or even a simple hosts entry if the registration server is defined by domain name.

The managers of this hypothetical software company would surely complain if their cars were remotely disabled because the manufacturer wanted to sell a new model. Similarly their customers should complain (via the courts) when the product they bought is remotely disabled to force them to upgrade.

As a sibling poster points out, running a license server is a trivial expense and if you require it for your product you should budget to keep it running. It's roughly $400 for a perpetuity paying $20/y to run the server indefinitely.

I completely agree - but hopefully if the management knows what they are doing in 2002 they don't sell a license that gives the buyer perpetual right to use the software (they can't guarantee that so long as the maintenance of license servers is required. Having a perpetual license is basically an infinite future expense even if the cost is trivial.)

> Having a perpetual license is basically an infinite future expense even if the cost is trivial.

It's a one-time expense if budgeted properly. Buy a perpetuity to cover it. If you ever discontinue the service you can release an unlimited copy of the software and recover the value of the perpetuity.

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