What is the future for Legacy DirectAdmin License holders?

[Richard G]

and in all cases I don't see any interest in proposals made here.

If they were interesting enough they would certainly say so. Also take in effect that it's a company. They don't want to make any promises they can't keep. So for sure they are looking into the proposals made, but so many aren't made and imho don't generate a required steady income.

As of if the company is profitable or if the license abuse is killing it, there would not be a single company making statements about such things in public. At least I've never seen anybody do that, so one can't expect that either from DA.

I was willing to send them ~5K$ / year if we they accepted a more reasonable pricing for the conversion of all my owned intenal licences, they never bothered reply of even contact me

You could also contact them yourself via a ticket. And those 5K a year I remember only slightly but in any case it doesn't help if you are the only one willing to do so. Several also stated they were not prepared to pay even a dollar for something they paid lifetime for. So then it's little use to go negotiate about 1 person willing to pay 5k/year, and others less or more.
So they do care, but you have a narrow field of view about this.

However, hurting their LLH's at this moment by doing cutbacks, for sure doesn't help with income, neither will the removal of MariaDB.

mostly customer promoting them since the beginning ( 2005 for me). I really don't understand the situation.

So how many normal licenses where bought due to your promoting the, how many orders did you do after buying the LLH's? Maybe with you some. But most just give of rent DA licenses with a server, they don't promote DA. Seems DA does not have extra generated income from LLH's. And seems lot didn't even order anything anymore for many years. Neither did I, because we don't need extra licenses anymore, like probably most of the LLH's.
So the income has to come from the normal licenses and that seems not enough if they start hurting us.
What is there hard to understand about that situation?

 

[akadi81]

There are many points of view but we should try to put ourselfs in both positions.

1. DA position. DA sold "lifetime" licenses to get cash flow in a short period of course and it's not our problem to comment about that decision. Very bad decision in my unimportant opinion. But... what is "lifetime"? My lifetime? DA lifetime? DA admin lifetime? Earth lifetime? They could renname DA and the problem with existing "lifetime" licenses is solved is 5 minutes. But the BAD reputation will stay LIFETIME.
"Lifetime" licenses are extra in this moment and upseting for DA. Probably there are ten of thousens of them, and in this situations the big number matters.

2. Lifetime customer position. I am personally dissapointed by DA in this moment. I bought 5 lifetime licenses and paying 300 usd for every license was a LOT for me (romania). Right now... they are dropping support for one "little" product, to test the situation.... after a period a new product will be dropped and so on and so on. In this situation the BAD reputation will be there for a while.... I know that offering support for "free" for "lifetime" is not that funny, but was not my decision and they should offer full support for every major software included from begining.

The only real solution for DA I see in the future is to accept his mistakes and try to buy the "lifetime" licenses back if customers agree. From the begining the "lifetime" should be named: 30-40-50 years or whatever. Then, DA should offer full support (mariadb too) for everybody, because this cost nothing for them. Who say that offering mariadb 10.11 for lifetimers is costly, it's just a liar. So full support for everybody 30 years till now and nobody could say then that "I didnt knew". If you are unhappy with that, full refund today (lets say full refund only 1 year from the announce) for every "lifetime" license. Why full refund? Because "lifetime" could be 1 bilion years if you compare with the right thing. After 30 years the lifetime licenses are disabled. All of them. Of course.... DA should be prepaired to pay for that lifetime mistake....

It's hard to admit when you made a big mistake, specially when that mistake is "lifetime".

Lets remember a little: https://web.archive.org/web/20160902004641/https://directadmin.com/pricing.php

 

[Richard G]

I think you are correct in both positions and indeed DA made a big mistake selling so many lifetime licences.

However, you are wrong about the lifetime part. With software (and I have this seen happening with all kind of software), it can be declared End Of Life. Lifetime doesn't mean "as long as you live" but means "as long as the software lives".
So they could declare lifetime licenses or old codebase end of life at a certain point. That's the only difference.

And you're wrong about another thing.

Who say that offering mariadb 10.11 for lifetimers is costly, it's just a liar.

If it was just offering MariaDB then you would be correct, because that is open source. The costs are in the fact that a developer needs to create and update all integration from DA into MariaDB every time. Especially if new versions are coming out like 10.11.
There is a cost to that and you are totally forgetting about this.

Why should all panels otherwise be that expensive it that was all for free? Be aware of the fact that for normal licenses, Cpanel and Plesk are not doing anything much different and cP is more than 3x expensive as DA and Plesk 2x as expensive as DA.
So making such statement that all integration and updates costs nothing is in fact wrong. If it was that easy, there would be way more panels out there too.

But as for point 1 and 2, you're correct.

 

[akadi81]

I think you are correct in both positions and indeed DA made a big mistake selling so many lifetime licences.

However, you are wrong about the lifetime part. With software (and I have this seen happening with all kind of software), it can be declared End Of Life. Lifetime doesn't mean "as long as you live" but means "as long as the software lives".
So they could declare lifetime licenses or old codebase end of life at a certain point. That's the only difference.

And you're wrong about another thing.

If it was just offering MariaDB then you would be correct, because that is open source. The costs are in the fact that a developer needs to create and update all integration from DA into MariaDB every time. Especially if new versions are coming out like 10.11.
There is a cost to that and you are totally forgetting about this.

Why should all panels otherwise be that expensive it that was all for free? Be aware of the fact that for normal licenses, Cpanel and Plesk are not doing anything much different and cP is more than 3x expensive as DA and Plesk 2x as expensive as DA.
So making such statement that all integration and updates costs nothing is in fact wrong. If it was that easy, there would be way more panels out there too.

But as for point 1 and 2, you're correct.

I respect your opinion and your help (direct or found in forum) over years and thank you!

"Lifetime" means about 1 milion years for me, because it's the lifetime of the planet earth. And this number is so low because I like you and I like DA. For you... means until EOL is declared by who took my $. Could be declared the next day after my payment, right? Not so right... Lifetime means a very very long period for both of us, and means whatever we want if was not specified. And is was not speficied. So... DA should admit and pay for mistakes. That is the only way to get rid of lifetime licenses and remain with clean name/brand. If your tooth is hurting you must extract it even it hurts very bad. DA is trying to use duc tape for that bad tooth, and the bad image is just growing.

And the integration for one software with DA is made for monthly customers, that's why I say the cost is 0. The job is done already! Or DA is doing the same thing twice? I dont tkink so. I hope so....

Do not compare DA only with cP, Plesk... compare with HestiaCP, KeyHelp, CWP PRO, aaPanel also...

In the end the problem is not the price. It's about the promises made in the past, and that upcomming dissapointment that we all saw in the horizont. That dissaapointment is named "mariadb 10.11" in this moment, and we all guess that could be "ningx", "apache", "php", "exim" in the future.

 

[Richard G]

"Lifetime" means about 1 milion years for me, because it's the lifetime of the planet earth.

You are entitled to that opinion, but if you check out what it means with software, unfortunately this is not the case.
I didn't say DA would declare it EOL, I only said it is an option for software. For example I have a vbulletin lifetime license which was declared end of life with 3.8. And in spite of the fact that later on they brought out an 3.8.7 and even 3.8.8 we were not entitled to that, only if we bought 4.x licenses. We could still use the 3.8.6 but well... at a certain point the php version to be used will get too old.

Same with DA, you can keep using it as long as you want momentarily (lifetime), the issue here is the lifetime updates and upgrades, whereas the upgrades part seems not to get fullfilled now.

You really are mistaken about the integration cost. I would suggest to try and setup a panel yourself and then try integrating all that stuff. Part of the stuff is indeed already done, but there is always something new. It costs time and time=money.

Do not compare DA only with cP, Plesk... compare with HestiaCP, KeyHelp, CWP PRO, aaPanel also...

Why not with cP or even Plesk? It's even most comparible with Plesk, not with the free panels. If you want to compare, make the correct comparison so compare professional panels you have to pay for which are only 3.
Comparing professional paid software with free software is comparing appels and pears. Lot can be the same but then you could also compare CP and Plesk against the free software. So no, only compare the paid software. So if it's all that free as you say, and done, then there is not a single reason for CP (well... maybe cp because they create their own rpm's) but certainly not Plesk to be so much more expensive than DA. They are doing the same thing.

It's about the promises made in the past

Promises can be broken. But breaking agreement is worse. Lifetime upgrades was part of the agreement and so has to include MariaDB 10.11 for several reasons including a precedent created by DA.
We don't disagree about that point, in the contrary. I'm still very irritated (at least) about that too.

I don't think Exim or Apache will be removed, but we don't have any guarantee about databases. So for example what if Mysql 9 will be released at some time. Now at this moment we still have Mysql as an alternative in 2 years, but we need guarantees about upgrades like Mysql 9 at least.

P.s. Feel free to disagree with me, I don't mind. Opinions and arguments differ, that is normal, I won't take that as offensive or something.

 

[floyd]

If it was just offering MariaDB then you would be correct, because that is open source. The costs are in the fact that a developer needs to create and update all integration from DA into MariaDB every time. Especially if new versions are coming out like 10.11.
There is a cost to that and you are totally forgetting about this.

He should have said no extra cost because they are already doing for the normal license holders. It costs nothing for lifetime license holders to also use it. Where the code is there for 1 person or a million persons the cost it the same.

 

[Richard G]

He should have said no extra cost

You might be right. I'm no coder so I don't know if it needs extra effort to put it in the legacy codebase or the same from modern codebase can be used.

 

[floyd]

Same with DA, you can keep using it as long as you want momentarily (lifetime), the issue here is the lifetime updates and upgrades, whereas the upgrades part seems not to get fullfilled now.

I agree that the problem really is the updates that they promised. I have a copy of Office 2003 with a valid license. I can still use it. But I don't get any of the new features that came out after that. And MS didn't promise me any updates to the 2003 version. I got exactly what I paid for. DA did promise updates. So now I am not getting what I paid for from DA.

Many companies promise updates for 1 year or some other defined amount of time. DA didn't do that and now they are trying to backtrack.

 

[ThinkBased]

It seems that they're not allowing us to use our lifetime licenses anymore even without update !

 

[floyd]

It seems that they're not allowing us to use our lifetime licenses anymore even without update !

Did something stop working for you?

 

[ThinkBased]

Did something stop working for you?

Definitely! I can no longer use my license either. They've suddenly restricted it to an IP address that I no longer have access to!

 

[Richard G]

And what kind of license do you have then? Internal lifetime? Or VPS license?

Ah yes... I remember. You were the one with internal license who didn't even could proove having a valid website selling internal licenses.
Most likely your license was limited with good reason. Last I've seen you updated the ticket.
And we decided not to discuss that anymore.

 

[ThinkBased]

And what kind of license do you have then? Internal lifetime? Or VPS license?

Ah yes... I remember. You were the one with internal license who didn't even could proove having a valid website selling internal licenses.
Most likely your license was limited with good reason. Last I've seen you updated the ticket.
And we decided not to discuss that anymore.

It's best to hold your position and not prolong my discussions. This isn't just about you; let's keep the conversation clear of pointless messages. I'm engaging with others.

 

[floyd]

It's best to hold your position and not prolong my discussions. This isn't just about you; let's keep the conversation clear of pointless messages. I'm engaging with others.

All of my lifetime internal licenses are working just fine. Its only the abusers that are affected. The only way to fix it is to email directadmin directly and stop moaning and complaining here. We cannot help you.

 

[Richard G]

This isn't just about you;

Isn't about you either and you didn't hold position either. I wasn't talking about me. You're the one stating pointless message here, which is why I responded. We are all engaging with everybody here in the thread. And the future is in danger due to abuse, so my reply was to the point.
I'll stop if you stop.

 

[LawsHosting]

When I'm bored and/or coding, I like to come to this thread for some banter...... and, most of the time, it doesn't disappoint

 

[ThinkBased]

Isn't about you either and you didn't hold position either. I wasn't talking about me. You're the one stating pointless message here, which is why I responded. We are all engaging with everybody here in the thread. And the future is in danger due to abuse, so my reply was to the point.
I'll stop if you stop.

I won’t stop, so you can continue playing the clown role here

 

[ThinkBased]

All of my lifetime internal licenses are working just fine. Its only the abusers that are affected. The only way to fix it is to email directadmin directly and stop moaning and complaining here. We cannot help you.

That's probably because you're on a subnet or you haven't tried changing your IP addresses recently. soon or late you'll start moaning as well

 

[Richard G]

I won’t stop, so you can continue playing the clown role here

You're being the clown, keeping at it without any proof, rather proof that you're most likely abusing a license. Highly suspicious.
And if you had read the other thread, you could see floyd had no issues at al changing ip or subnet, neither have I.
I know for a fact, that it's very easy give proof to DA if required, only a couple of suspicous guys who can't even provide a website keep maoning here.

 

[floyd]

Its easy for me to prove the IPs are assigned to me. Just do a reverse lookup with trace on any of them. Can you do the same?