Are lifetime licences really lifetime?
Like most companies and storefronts selling software, we use the words “Buy” and “Purchase” to describe the transaction, but of course you’re not buying software on a disk nor the software itself, but rather a licence to use the software. Which in the case of the non-commercial versions of the software are described as perpetual or lifetime licences.
As we have seen with some software and online games however, the licence grant being perpetual does not necessarily mean you can actually use it indefinitely. Activation servers get shut down, other infrastructure the software depends on ceases to exist, support gets otherwise withdrawn such that the software ceases to function, or occasionally developers and companies deliberately stop the software from working (often to sell you something else)
What have you done so far to ensure access?
At time of writing, CubeCoders is 12 years old. Our very first customer, who first purchased McMyAdmin 1 - still has a licence they can use to this day. While McMyAdmin no longer receives new features or appreciable updates, we were committed to making sure our original customers had an upgrade path.
And so that is why AMP accepts McMyAdmin 1/2 licences. It only allows them for Minecraft instances, but it means that people who paid for a lifetime licence for a Minecraft server management panel continue to have a product that is actively supported and updated over a decade later.
This exemplifies our attitude towards ongoing support for our products. Lifetime means lifetime. Not “So long as it is convenient for us”. It would have undoubtedly been more profitable to simply ignore McMyAdmin licences and make everyone buy new AMP licences since it’s a different product, but that’s not what we did.
Despite all this however - it is still possible to run McMyAdmin today. The licencing system has been maintained in a backwards compatible manner so that people who want to keep using the exact thing they originally purchased can continue to do so.
What about the future?
Anticipating the future is difficult, but there are a few specific things that we both will and won’t commit to:
Maintaining licencing for legacy software.
For software that is no longer being developed, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to keep activation systems running for them indefinitely. So while we do not have any plans to shut down or obsolete the systems that make McMyAdmin for example continue to be usable, we also cannot make any specific guarantees that it will stay that way.
However…
We do commit to making sure that in such cases, users are always given a forward facing upgrade path. Much like the way that McMyAdmin users can upgrade to AMP without paying extra, should AMP itself be obsoleted by something different - we commit to making sure that those users continue to have some kind of upgrade path that uses their original licence and provides comparable functionality.
The Update of Last Resort
In the situation where CubeCoders is unable to continue functioning as a company and will be put in a position where there is no ongoing ownership of the intellectual property for its software - we commit to shipping final updates wherever possible to allow our software to operate without access to it’s licence server at all.