What is the future for Legacy DirectAdmin License holders?

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The Mariadb issue will be for all legacy licenses yes.
The conversion option I'm not sure but probably yes. You can ask them.
 
Some general thoughts, followed by a possible solution...

For what it's worth, I'm trying to be understanding and sympathetic to the position that DA is in, especially about supporting something that was purchased 15-20 years ago. That said, lifetime licenses were sold through June 2019, so not all licenses are 15+ years old. And from the customer's standpoint, when they purchased the license, the "spirit of the contract" was lifetime...

MariaDB Support
DirectAdmin Sales said:
sacrificing one SQL product integration, that's a very small sacrifice in the big picture
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This is not fair to customers IMHO.

DA has offered the MariaDB service all along, and keeping this service updated has been the expectation of customers. And it's unprofessional to remove support, without any prior announcement. Customers are only learning about this decision afterwards...

And now, the biggest problem about stopping updates is you're potentially creating future security risks for all servers using MariaDB. To quote DA from a couple years ago:

DirectAdmin Sales said:
industry security experts have asked us to reconsider this offering because it encourages saving money by staying with older, potentially vulnerable software that becomes a risk to the server itself and other servers on the net.
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Comparing DA's decision to support Redis versus MariaDB... Redis was never offered as part of DA, and was later introduced as a Pro Pack feature. But MariaDB was always offered as part of DA, therefore continued support for MariaDB should be provided... I feel this is fair and reasonable. And DA already supports MariaDB, so there isn't extra work on DA's part to allow all license holders to continue receiving updates.

Possible Solution
Been giving this a lot of thought. This is what I would propose:
  • Lifetime licenses continue to receive updates for all current services for the lifetime of the operating system's Full Support period.
  • A nominal one time fee (per license) is required for every future operating system release.
RHEL has three support periods — Full Support, Maintenance Support, Extended Life Cycle Support.

And I recommend aligning all DA lifetime licenses to continue receiving updates for all services through the entire RHEL Full Support period.

This makes everything simple and straightforward...

Lifetime licenses can continue to be used indefinitely, and DA will provide updates for all services for the lifetime of the current OS cycle. This ensures servers are secure and updated for continued production use through the Full Support period for an OS release cycle.

For example, all lifetime licenses are updated to RHEL 9 Lifetime... servers can be run for lifetime, and DA will provide updates for all services through the RHEL Full Support Period. And a nominal one-time fee per license will be required to upgrade the license to RHEL 10 Lifetime, and this will repeat for RHEL 11, 12, etc.

This solution creates a future revenue stream for DA, and there is no additional work on DA's part because they are only supporting the same services they've already been supporting.

I believe the upgrade price should be nominal because lifetime license holders purchased those DA licenses wanting to avoid recurring monthly subscription fees. Thinking about what would be reasonable and fair, I feel the price should be $19 to $29 USD per license. And I know many customers believe they shouldn't have to pay anything, but paying this upgrade fee every OS cycle helps support DA for future development cycles, and that's a win-win for both sides.

This is the best solution that I've come up with that caters both to DA and customers. And I really want to see DA succeed, while taking care of us customers who have supported and believed in DA all along.
 
bertvandepoel said:
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.
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Don't expect this from the current way Directadmin is being handled. I have been fighting this for a while now from the first big change they made to the lifetime licenses... Never seen a e-mail anywhere about changes to the system until shit stopped working and went looking for answers and found em here on the forum. Since then I have my hopes not so high anymore on Directadmin. Even thinking of writing my own panel that just has the basics that we need without all current bloatware that is being added.

beansbaxter said:
For example, all lifetime licenses are updated to RHEL 9 Lifetime... servers can be run for lifetime, and DA will provide updates for all services through the RHEL Full Support Period. And a nominal one-time fee per license will be required to upgrade the license to RHEL 10 Lifetime, and this will repeat for RHEL 11, 12, etc.
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I'd be willing to pay for this. Its like the same for Litespeed licenses and I have no problem with paying a small fee just to "upgrade" the license to support a newer OS.

But yea, i guess we will see or eventually just move on to a different panel.
 
We bought the lifetime licenses when there was no restriction on them and they were the highest license sold at that time.

The current offer to get a full feature set of software is converting your lifetime license to a monthly paid license with some discount.

From a business ethics perspective, lifetime licenses should be equal to current unlimited licenses.

If there should be an upgrade, there should be a one-time fee to upgrade the lifetime license to include all current features of the software.

By the way, I've been using DirectAdmin for more than 15 years and I have no complaints with the company and software, they even helped with converting dedicated licenses to internal data centre licenses for me and it helped a lot at that time, but I don't understand current licensing policy.

I understand it may be better for them to sell monthly license types in the long term, so I'm okay to buy new monthly licenses when I need new licenses, but why are you punishing the people who already invested in your company in the past?
 
So, lots of good arguments were given, lots of concerns were voiced, lots of requests were made and most importantly a large amount of questions were asked about the future. To my surprise, DirectAdmin hasn't responded at all. Why did we split off this thread if DirectAdmin is going to ignore it? We still don't know what the future is for these licenses, what implications are, and how DirectAdmin will try to do better in the future. Are these licenses unofficially dead when MariaDB 10.6 loses support in 2026? Will DirectAdmin start pulling support for other CustomBuild software before that? Are there low-price upgrade paths? What's the plan for the future in general for these licenses? And finally, can we get better communication in the future please! I'm sure I missed some other questions too. There's been plenty of unadressed questions and concerns.

Can we expect any response or are we simply going to be ignored? @flm @smtalk @DirectAdmin Support @DirectAdmin Sales
 
I upgraded to the discounted standard offer. 'Must keep paying' see what happens. I feel other panels are going in a better direction. I love DA, it is pretty easy to use, setup and run. It works with Acronis, Litespeed and major plugins.

I wish the interface was more polished, maybe a bit more like a website, with some nicer more modern icons.

I feel like features have been forgotten about, especially the backup etc.. WordPress manager could do with a face lift and more options. Especially having it in admin for easy management of all wordpress sites on the server.
 
I don't often read any thread in depth.

Has anyone said why? Why omit MariaDB 10.6? What is so different beyond this version? Or is it just a cash grab from us "lifetime" users?
 
Active8 said:
What was the price ?
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That's 50% of the official price.

bertvandepoel said:
To my surprise, DirectAdmin hasn't responded at all.
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Yes they did in post #3. Indeed there were several reply's and suggestions and opinions, however, count the responses from here, and compare them to the amount of lifetime holders. Then it's very few.
I'm sure they will get back to us as soon as they made a 100% decision to leave it like is or do something for us smaller lifetime holders, as it seems the datacenters don't care, don't know or don't respond, or only very few.

But an update of @DirectAdmin Sales would be appreciated.
 
Lifetime owner here (1 license), and I agree with @beansbaxter:
Possible Solution
Been giving this a lot of thought. This is what I would propose:
  • Lifetime licenses continue to receive updates for all current services for the lifetime of the operating system's Full Support period.
  • A nominal one time fee (per license) is required for every future operating system release.
I don't know how any of you are using your DA for, but some of us don't do business (offer hosting, etc) but use it for personal projects & hosting it at home.
It's extremely inconvenient and frustrating to force upgrade to a monthly subscription, or else X won't work, then Y won't work, then it'll just all not work... which is the reason I agree with the above proposition.

And the most-likely reason you've not heard from the vast majority of lifetime holders is because they didn't expect to be screwed in this way.
Screw them and you'll hear from them as well.

I'm sorry but... this all feels like a money grab.

And something else to consider.... if you alienate your license holders and a truly open solution emerges... a lot of people will choose that and.. you've guessed it - DA will breathe the fresh air of no sales..
 
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d.dobrev said:
Lifetime owner here (1 license), and I agree with @beansbaxter:
Possible Solution
Been giving this a lot of thought. This is what I would propose:
  • Lifetime licenses continue to receive updates for all current services for the lifetime of the operating system's Full Support period.
  • A nominal one time fee (per license) is required for every future operating system release.
I don't know how any of you are using your DA for, but some of us don't do business (offer hosting, etc) but use it for personal projects & hosting it at home.
It's extremely inconvenient and frustrating to force upgrade to a monthly subscription, or else X won't work, then Y won't work, then it'll just all not work... which is the reason I agree with the above proposition.

And the most-likely reason you've not heard from the vast majority of lifetime holders is because they didn't expect to be screwed in this way.
Screw them and you'll hear from them as well.

I'm sorry but... this all feels like a money grab.

And something else to consider.... if you alienate your license holders and a truly open solution emerges... a lot of people will choose that and.. you've guessed it - DA will breathe the fresh air of no sales..
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I have to say that I didn't hear anything from DirectAdmin about this. It just appeared when a hosted customer asked to upgrade to Plus-pack. If we had heard about it, we would have spoken up against this. It is basically stealing. We bought the licenses in good faith and in our case we spent 1 335 USD for 15 licenses. We use only 5 of them.
 
What on earth is going on? DirectAdmin sold us 15 Lifetime licenses 10 years ago or more - before DirectAdmin was so popular.

We bought them when we knew that all software was to be updated. To now go back and say it will not be updated, is a clear breach of the deal we made. The argument "the software you have installed will still work (not just updated)" is not good enough, because it was not what was told/rule on the time of purchase. We purchased it with updates.

Having a lifetime license is a risk for a company and not something you should take easily and sell. But you sold licenses based on a promise. Trying to go around the promise by making our licenses useless by not updating the software goes against the hole purchase. Going back on promises will eventually hurt you as a company.

We are an ISP that sells deals with fixed prices. The price we gave customers 10 years ago, is the same today. Stop doing unethical business and change your licenses with the wind. If you made a bad deal on the sale, accept it and rather charge more for new ones to cover up for the "loss".

It is not like the change of license will do a rush of people buying new licenses from you. I do understand you sold many of these licenses and think that you could earn a fortune if all of them converted to monthly license, but I suspect most of them don't or maybe not even using DA any more. I assume most lifetime holders doesn't require much support either.

We have even unused lifetime licenses. Not like we would start to pay for them.
 
sparek said:
I don't have any lifetime licenses. I see a bulk of the discussion revolving around these license. And I'm sure if I had a lifetime license, I'd be upset about this too.

Still... you have to understand that any "lifetime" offering is always a bad idea.
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While I do agree it often is a bad idea, I do understand why they might do it anyway. Maybe that's why they are where they are today. They needed improvements/developers, and before they can start paying them, they need the money. Some of us - like me - took a chance when the control panel was not that great, but it did the job for some smaller clients. I paid 1 335 USD for lifetime licenses. For some that is small money, for me it wasn't. I might as well could have lost that money if DirectAdmin did terrible. Would DirectAdmin pay me back if I wasn't happy? I doubt it. Now they are saying thank you for the 1 335, but we don't care what we promised many years ago. Now start paying.

And not a word in advance, I found out couple of days ago. Shameful.

I also see that they continue with promises about "price freeze" for monthly price, but then add exceptions and basically makes the promise worthless. See what they did with us lifetime license holder, when there wasn't any condition.

I even reached out when the license expire date was issued to "2038", many, many years ago. They said it was just to have a date, but they would issue renewal all the way.

Even with this said, I would be willing to pay a small yearly amount (not monthly) for having things like WordPress manager and node manager available as it is new features not available when we got lifetime licenses. But punishing the people that bet our money on DA by giving no notice, no discount, nothing.. It is just horrible. As much as I like DAs development last 2 years, we would considering stopping promoting this panel to our hosting customers just based on the business practice they have started now.
 
webuser said:
I even reached out when the license expire date was issued to "2038", many, many years ago. They said it was just to have a date, but they would issue renewal all the way.
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Eh no, not just to have a date. 2038 is a well known end date of linux. Kind of like a year 2000 problem which Windows had. So that 2038 date is on loads of Linux stuff.
en.wikipedia.org

Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

I don't know why you complaint about the pricing. You say you bought 15 licenses for 1335 dollar? Well most likely not from DA themselves, maybe 2nd hand or something? Or if you did and it's external licenses, you have no reason to complaint as this is a very major discount in that case. Normal cost would be $4.485.
So you probably are talking about internal licenses, which are way cheaper.
You can't blaim DA either for the fact that you didn't use some of those licenses. You didn't have to buy them then and your "loss" would be a lot less then these 1335.

So you could make use 10 years long for a minor price of a great panel, and you still can because nobody really needs MariaDB 10.11 right now. Still can use the panel like always. It's just 1 new MariaDB version and the end of the story is not told yet.
So that is way less as most had to pay and external license holders had to pay.

Having that said.... I agree to the rest you wrote, lack of clear communication, sudden change, was not clear that this was or would be result of the code change which they announced a year ago. So no not fair indeed.

But with every lifetime license you always have the risk that it will be declared end of life. This did not happen yet. But it's always an option, like vBulletin who called a vbulletin license end of life and also paying had to be done new.

So I'm still not happy either but I'll wait what DA will come up with based on all suggestions they get now and discussions they are having now with customers.
 
I came across this thread by chance. I predicted this several years ago :cry:

Indeed the first and major problem: lack of communication!
We need to read in a forum that licenses we bought will become useless

We have around 10 lifetime licenses bought years and years ago and now we should move to a monthly paid license => $290/month to keep using them.

Like allready suggested, devide the price in (small) license price and support price (monthly paid support, or pay per incident).
And make the support not connected to a license. So if we have 10 licenses we only need to buy 1 (monthly) support contract (and not 10).

And maybe another suggestion: work with 'feature' versions.
Pay a one time fee for a ControlPanel 'feature' version (upgrade), and then pay a small monthly/yearly price for (security) updates.

Also make it possible to pay per year (maybe with a discount).
 
mmgenius said:
and now we should move to a monthly paid license => $290/month to keep using them.
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I think you read wrong. You can still use them, just not with MariaDB 10.11. Also it's not $290/month but if you upgrade to monthly licenses it will be for half price, zo 14 a month, which will be 140 a month for 10 licenses. Still a lot of money tho.

I think DA might come with some final statement or option for those who do want to keep things working and not convert to monthley, but that can take some time.
You suggestion sounds interesting. Several nice suggestions are made, so I hope they will take it into consideration.
 
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