What is the future for Legacy DirectAdmin License holders?

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beansbaxter

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fln said:
@exlhost please make sure you are using non-legacy DirectAdmin license. MariaDB 10.11 will not be supported for legacy DA products.
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I've been thinking about this entire situation, and I'm super bummed out about how things are appearing to play out...

From a business perspective, I can be sympathetic to DA about their ongoing support for legacy holders. However, from a customer service perspective, this is not the way to go about making changes. When DA was not the most popular option available, we purchased licenses that were made available. And DA is here today because of that financial support.

Maybe I am being naive, but if you already have CustomBuild support for MariaDB 10.11, what extra work is really required to enable that option for legacy license holders. This service has already been developed/built into DA, so why not allow us to keep our systems current with the latest security updates necessary for servers. And if MariaDB will no longer be updated, what's going to happen with future support with other services — Nginx, PHP, etc.?

With respect, at minimum, please oooooh please do the following:
  • Be transparent and forthright about the current/future limitations there will be for legacy license holders. Be explicit when telling us specific services will no longer be supported and give us a proper timeline in advance to plan accordingly. I don't think that is too much to ask for.

  • Provide a proper compromise as a path forward for legacy license holders to continue maintaining DA in the foreseeable future. And while I am not sure what that compromise should be, this should be open for discussion, because I think we all can agree that the current situation is an unprofessional approach.
I love DirectAdmin. And I hope to see this situation resolved.

— Making this dedicated discussion thread, since the previous conversation is being lost in DA RC update threads.
 
Very good idea. Let's point everyone here instead, so we can keep the release threads clean & on-topic.

Regarding the first point made:

If absolute certainty is required, then our official legacy codebase explanation from over a year ago is what you should adhere to (basically, that there are no guarantees). You'd just have to assume the worst to achieve that certainty/stability. The expectations placed on us simply don't give us the luxury of providing detailed or long-term promises/road-maps with much clarity, especially given the feedback we have received. For example, some people expecting a minimum of 100 more years of development on their legacy products.

For those not willing to assume the worst, please note that we are likely the only software you have that:

- Could be purchased 20 years ago for a one-time fee
- Has received over 250 releases in that time (actual development, not just maintenence/bugfixes)
- An expectation that this will continue for another 20-100 years, depending on who you ask

We may be the only ones in the world doing this. If our 21st year involves sacrificing one SQL product integration, that's a very small sacrifice in the big picture.

Regarding the second point made:

We are certainly open to suggestions on solutions. Feel free to post them publicly! We have received many in private but most are lifetime license holders who say paying is not an option to them, so I suppose the solutions will need to be very creative? So far, our response has been that the solution for now is keeping things going and making the sacrifices needed to do it.
 
DirectAdmin Sales said:
but most are lifetime license holders who say paying is not an option to them, so I suppose the solutions will need to be very creative?
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I don't think that is very wise of them to say paying is not an option, because that would mean that their licenses would become useless in 2026 anyway.
However, it was very unclear in that statement a year ago that support for simple apps like MariaDB would stop, nobody expected or thought of that, which is the most frustrating point.

As far as I'm concerned (still not happy with the situation, but who is), I'd rather pay some fee to keep or updates going or maybe pay a bit more maybe yearly fee and change the complete legacy codebase to modern (kind of the same like converting but then with keeping licenses, easier to switch), then having them render useless in 2026 due to lack of MariaDB (or any other support).
So for me, paying is an option.

Maybe we can create some kind of poll for this with choices if more idea's arise by others.
 
exlhost said:
Im in for:

Pay some extra fee monthly to keep updates going on for lifetime / datacenter license.
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Make it yearly and I'm in.

Also communicate upfront about this type of thing.
Finding out about this mess in the forum is really not the way to notify your customer base about changes in licensing.
This is stressful for everyone involved.
 
Hello.

I am a lifetime license holder (datacenter license). I have been reading now the first time that further updates for MariaDB are not supported in future anymore, or have i been missunderstanding something, then please correct me.

For me & my company we dont need any further fancy addons, all the tools what my lifetime license at moment is providing are enough for me/us. But if its really the case that updates for MariaDB are not supported in future anymore, that sure we would be willing to pay a small yearly fee, to get this updates. No question, because otherwise my/our license would be useless.

Greets
 
I think we all very much welcome this separate topic. In my opinion one of the main frustrations really is the lack of clear communication. I understand that DirectAdmin was under the impression they had clearly communicated they could pull anything at any time from the lifetime licenses. I must admit that I interpreted the texts made available by DirectAdmin very differently. Like many, it seemed focused on new features and other additions. With the idea being lifetime licenses were maintained but not improved.

I absolutely sympathize with the fact that licenses that had a one time fee don't support DirectAdmin much right now, even though they did give the company the support it needed way back. My concern is largely about clear communication. Whether it's commercial software, open source tools, or even freeware, it's become the norm to communicate clearly and in advance about EOL, features being dropped, or changes in licensing/pricing. Those who have not adhered to that have been met with outrage, which in some sense is happening right now here.

In my opinion, the main issue here is not that DirectAdmin wants to again start earning something from lifetime licenses or that they are deciding to remove certain features from lifetime licenses. I think many of us sympathize with the financial reality of these licenses. What I do think is a problem is that it's not announced and that we have to find it out "with immediate effect". My expectation would've been an email to all lifetime license holders with clear communication that what is included in a lifetime license is changing, and then a roadmap of which aspects or tools will lose support or change at what point in time. I would also expect this to happen several months in advance. For example an email 6 months ago outlining that MariaDB 10.6 will be the last MariaDB LTS supported on lifetime licenses and that support for 10.11 is scheduled in around 6 months for monthly paying customers. With clear information about whether other aspects of Custombuild (PHP, Apache, Nginx, Exim, etc.) will also lose support in the future or not.

I think the outrage here on the forums is largely because people weren't warned in advance and there was no space to discuss this before it happened. Many of your users don't (regularly or at all) read this forum, and so they find out a feature is being removed from their license while performing updates. This creates anger and frustration while people are I think in general willing to support DirectAdmin. If this was communicated in advance, with space for a discussion on the forums as well, this could've been a much less messy situation and I think you could've already seen customers upgrading to some kind of small fee arrangement to support DirectAdmin's work on aspects such as Custombuild.

Again, we understand the situation you are in and we want to move forward with a solution, but a clearer communication via email and well in advance would've been more suitable for something like this. I think we should move forward now, but I would still recommend reaching out via email to all license holders who are being impacted by this situation, so they are aware of the problem as well as the, presumably soon to be decided, solution.
 
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A year ago or so , DA offered legacy license holders to "upgrade" to the propack with some discount.
Maybe DA should offer this again to the legacy holders with yearly subscriptions.

I am afraid if they asking to much fee, users will ditch DA for other free panels like Hestia or Keyhelp, pure because they only need the core software like php/mysql/dovecot/exim without fancy bloatware

just my thoughts
 
jessica01 said:
Hello.

I am a lifetime license holder (datacenter license). I have been reading now the first time that further updates for MariaDB are not supported in future anymore, or have i been missunderstanding something, then please correct me.

For me & my company we dont need any further fancy addons, all the tools what my lifetime license at moment is providing are enough for me/us. But if its really the case that updates for MariaDB are not supported in future anymore, that sure we would be willing to pay a small yearly fee, to get this updates. No question, because otherwise my/our license would be useless.

Greets
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We are in the same boat - we also have a owned license.
We need no further fancy addons/bloatware and are happy with all the features what directadmin is offering right now with our license. Thats enough for us.

I am not often here in the forum, so i am surprised that i read about such drastic changes here in a forum and that i got no e-mail about this changes/topic.

On one side its sad that suddenly lifetime licenses are getting "useless" when they are getting no further updates, but on other site, i can also understand DirectAdmin that they want to earn money.

We would agree to pay a small fee on yearly base for necessary updates (like MariaDB) and security fixes, but please a fair amount. We are happy with DirectAdmin after all the Cpanel drama from the past and dont want to switch the panel again in such a short time...

Greets
 
What is the deal around MariaDB anyway? Are they going down the route of RHEL?

All I'm hearing is only MariaDB will stop working for legacy licences. What is the deal here? Did I miss something?
 
TL;DR: the latest MariaDB version is only available in CustomBuild for the current/newest licenses. Old lifetime and the Personal (24$/y) won’t get it.

And especially that the “old” Personal license won’t get it annoys me. Still a paying license that was sold not too long ago.
 
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Erulezz said:
TL;DR: the latest MariaDB version is only available in CustomBuild for the current/newest licenses. Old lifetime and the Personal (24$/y) won’t get it.

And especially that the “old” Personal license won’t get it annoys me. Still a paying license that was sold not too long ago.
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You still have to pay yearly fee but you won't get updates, even worse than free control panel. Not everyone need a personal plus license which cost 60$ a year ?
 
Erulezz said:
And especially that the “old” Personal license won’t get it annoys me. Still a paying license that was sold not too long ago.
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Personally I don't think you have anything to complaint here. The personal license is a totally different situation. The only same thing is that it also has the legacy codebase.
Arguments:
1.) The personal licenses is no lifetime. It was a payed to begin with so never said it would last for long like the lifetime licences.
2.) It was intented for personal and hobby use, not to sell to customers to begin with.
3.) It's very very cheap, and if DA did not came out with this as first panel ever, there would have been something like this at any panel, because with this license, they forced cPanel and Plesk to do something similar.
4.) You can still use it until 2026 when MariaDB 10.6 gets EOL. Mostly one does not need to have the newest Mariadb asap, especially not hobbyists, which is still another 3 years.
5.) You can always upgrade to the $5/mo to get full support and all features which were in the pro pack and this price is still 1/3 of cPanels alternative and 1/2 the price of the Plesk alternative.

dinhphucv said:
Not everyone need a personal plus license which cost 60$ a year ?
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Have a look at the competitors prices, it's not fair to compare with free panels. Anyone can go free, also for the main licenses so that is not an argument.
 
Erulezz said:
TL;DR: the latest MariaDB version is only available in CustomBuild for the current/newest licenses. Old lifetime and the Personal (24$/y) won’t get it.

And especially that the “old” Personal license won’t get it annoys me. Still a paying license that was sold not too long ago.
Click to expand...
It starts with MariaDB and before you know it, it will apply to other parts as well.
It won't stop at MariaDB.
 
Richard G said:
5.) You can always upgrade to the $5/mo to get full support and all features which were in the pro pack
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Hi Richard can you show where this is ? last time i logged in i didn't see that option or did I miss something ?
 
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