CrossOver licensing behaviour?

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi and greetings from LinuxTag in Karlsruhe!

At our booth we had a visitor who told me that the version of
CrossOver Office that he had been using issued a timely warning
about license expiration few months before finally actually ceasing
to provide service exactly after one year.

This report is rather astonishing to me since I'm not too happy
about software which actually ceases to work after some time,
and I also wouldn't have expected Codeweavers to employ such
questionable policies.

On
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/upgrade_policy/
there is no mention of actually disabling the software after a year,
though. The only thing mentioned here is loss of support after a
year, which is perfectly fine with me. That way you're left with an
unsupported piece of ju^H^Hsoftware, yet may keep running it for centuries.
Given that a denial of service (pun intentional ;) after a year is
not mentioned on this web page, I have some reasons to suspect that this visitor
had some random issue making his installation fail to keep working.

The visitor told me that it may have been a special SuSE CrossOver version
(Wine Rack?). Does that one have specially restrictive terms, maybe?

Thanks for listening, now continuing to provide free quality advertisement for CXO
on LinuxTag ;-),

Andreas Mohr

[Jeremy White]

Gah!

I have no idea where he got that idea from, but we would
*never* do such a thing.

I can believe that CrossOver stopped working; that's
a very old version of Wine (it's cxoffice 1.3.1,
Wine circa early 2003).  And, as we all know, the
glibc and kernel guys have kept us hopping merrily
these past two years, reducing the chance that an old
binary build of Wine would work.

But it's just a coincidence...

Gotta love Linux, sometimes :-/

Cheers,

Jer

Andreas Mohr wrote:
> Hi and greetings from LinuxTag in Karlsruhe!
>
> At our booth we had a visitor who told me that the version of
> CrossOver Office that he had been using issued a timely warning
> about license expiration few months before finally actually ceasing
> to provide service exactly after one year.
>
> This report is rather astonishing to me since I'm not too happy
> about software which actually ceases to work after some time,
> and I also wouldn't have expected Codeweavers to employ such
> questionable policies.
>
> On
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/upgrade_policy/
> there is no mention of actually disabling the software after a year,
> though. The only thing mentioned here is loss of support after a
> year, which is perfectly fine with me. That way you're left with an
> unsupported piece of ju^H^Hsoftware, yet may keep running it for centuries.
> Given that a denial of service (pun intentional ;) after a year is
> not mentioned on this web page, I have some reasons to suspect that this visitor
> had some random issue making his installation fail to keep working.
>
> The visitor told me that it may have been a special SuSE CrossOver version
> (Wine Rack?). Does that one have specially restrictive terms, maybe?
>
> Thanks for listening, now continuing to provide free quality advertisement for CXO
> on LinuxTag ;-),
>
> Andreas Mohr

[Shachar Shemesh]

Andreas Mohr wrote:
> Hi and greetings from LinuxTag in Karlsruhe!
>
> At our booth we had a visitor who told me that the version of
> CrossOver Office that he had been using issued a timely warning
> about license expiration few months before finally actually ceasing
> to provide service exactly after one year.

Could it have been an email sent to notify the user the the *support* is 
about to expire?

I'm assuming it was not a demo version.

          Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com/

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 11:07:30AM +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Andreas Mohr wrote:
> > Hi and greetings from LinuxTag in Karlsruhe!
> >
> > At our booth we had a visitor who told me that the version of
> > CrossOver Office that he had been using issued a timely warning
> > about license expiration few months before finally actually ceasing
> > to provide service exactly after one year.
>
> Could it have been an email sent to notify the user the the *support* is 
> about to expire?
> It most likely was.

I'd think that it simply was a random (upgrade/downgrade/killgrade/...)
breakage (quote Jeremy: "sometimes you've gotta love Linux") causing CXO
to go down, unrelated to any notification of *support* expiration.

It might be a good idea to state in support expiration notifications that
this does *not* result in usage expiration of CXO at the same time,
i.e. that CXO can be used in an unlimited fashion, yet without support now.
But OTOH such a statement might be counter-productive for new support sales ;-)

Andreas Mohr