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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

This isn't an EOL for on-prem JIRA. It's a price increase. They used to offer two on-prem products, "Server" and "Data Center," and now they'll only offer "Data Center," which comes at a higher price. (They're also raising the price of Data Center.)

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It's highly suggestive of a direction though.

> It's On February 2, 2021 PT, we will stop selling new licenses for our server products and cease new feature development in our server product line...maintenance and support for an additional three years, ending February 2, 2024 PT.

> Even with three years to prepare for these changes, we understand that not every customer will be ready to make the switch from our server products to our cloud products. For these customers, we'll continue to offer our self-managed enterprise edition, Data Center.

Frankly, I have no idea what they'll do because so many plugins can only work with their on-prem API.

It's a strange distinction. I read through this page and still don't understand the difference between Server and Data Center. <shrug>

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/server-vs-data-...

One of the main differences: you can never "own" data center. As soon as you stop paying, you lose use of your software.

My company moved from server to Data center and didn't notice a difference from an end user perspective.

plugins that were certified for server will now complain (but should still work albiet unsupportedly) if they're not recertified for data center, and occasionally you have to buy a license for a plugin that you had for server because they made a certified version for data center, but otherwise the software looks feels and acts the same as before.

Some key differences include clustering for higher availability, rolling updates, and Crowd for authentication integration.

Data Center was/is only available for 500+ users which means it costs $20,400/year minimum.

Also this is also a big issue for customers who need to self-host things like this due to regulatory reasons, e.g. banks.

The majority of on-prem users are likely Server licenses, and not data center, so for that perceptive it's likely EOL.

if it's on-prem, can't you just edit it to not phone home?

You'd need to reverse-engineer the built java files, which probably isn't so easy and that a company will do this

Can’t you just firewall it? I imagine you’d lose support though.

Depends on what kind of check it's doing. I doubt it fails open and if it does you're violating the license and open to big damages from Atlassian.

I imagine reverse engineering it to not phone home would violate the license in the same way.

Yeah I meant even if it does fail open such that you could hack it to keep using it, doing so would definitely violate the license.

Not for a company, just for my own testing, but I did this several years back.

It was ridiculously easy assuming you know how a java decompiler works. One JAR needed to be patched and re-compiled, which is a trivial process if you know how classpaths work.

You don't even need to patch any files - you can patch classes at runtime using a "-javaagent" library.

There are plenty of libraries out there to facilitate this such as Javassist or Apache BCEL, and lots of legitimate uses (AOP, instrumentation, etc).

It'd be weird to have access to the command line but not to the jars themselves, I think. Creating a jar is simple if you have a zip program.

You wouldn't need to.

JIRA Server licenses are perpetual. You only pay if you want upgrades.

I've seen companies running JIRA from 2009.

1. You'd be violating a contract by doing so, and putting yourself/company at risk of incurring significant monetary damages specified in the contract (or having your license terminated);

2. You might be committing criminal copyright violation;

3. The most obvious countermeasure is to write something to detect whether the software stops phoning home and use it to trigger an investigation.

Securing server internet access using outbound firewall can easily stop calling home without modifying the code or affecting any valid licence terms.

Without knowing the license terms, it’s impossible to say either way.

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