Edit 20190612
It seems all the fuzz sort of got restored: if you have an old product, not under maintenance support, then the registration count has been bumped and can be bumped further through the sales/renewal department.
This got posted a few hours after my blog post got live (the WayBack link does not archive all comments, sorry for that, that’s why I quoted toe comment):
[WayBack] From the GM: New Updates and Changes to the Registration “Bumps” Policy [UPDATED] – Blog – Developer Tools – IDERA Community
Policy Update: We still receive occasional comments on this and want to make sure we are clear on our Policy. Registration limits were introduced a long time ago with very valid use cases, but many of these are now outdated. We still do them, just now they get approved by Account Management (Sales/Renewals) vs. Support. Further, we have done several auto-bumps for everyone that should limit these issues altogether (and will do more as needed). As communicated, over the summer, we will work on a more automated way to increase registration limits through the self-service portal.
Original article 20190611
Last month, people found out that retroactively, Embarcadero has changed the terms of the license agreements on products sold with a perpetual license:
In order to re-install those products, often a bump in license count is needed. That bump now requires an active maintenance subscription which has a substantial yearly cost.
This is yet another sign that Embarcadero parent company Idera is on their way towards becoming like Oracle or Computer Associates: hiding information behind account walls, and by all means trying to squeeze out money of older products.
I think the move is illegal in several countries, especially with products sold to private persons. Uwe Raabe agrees with me on that:
I am not sure they would get away with that – at least here in Germany. As long as the customer actually paid for the perpetual license (this excludes the CE), the ability to use it legally cannot be prohibited just because there is no current support contract. At least a reasonable fee for the registration bump would perhaps be acceptable, but definitely not denying it completely.
If you still own Delphi licenses, and are on maintenance for them, a path you might take is to switch to a local installation (on a separate machine, preferably virtual machine) of the ELC (formerly Belise) licensing server together with a named license.
That requires your machines to be in touch with that ELC service (you can reach it over a network connection, even via a tunnel) every 30 days to stay active.
Another way is to :
- always install in virtual machines, and keep a backup-history of those virtual machines at hand
- use different user names for doing different Delphi work (but be aware that a lot of Delphi tools and component suites still insist on installing as Administrator, therefore putting all the settings in that administrative user)
Note that :
- a Delphi license is bound to a Windows computer NAME, not a physical fingerprint of the machine
- it is likely easier to keep backups of the ECL/Belise server than of a full development machine
- ELC/Belise requires Java (JRE 1.5 or higher according to ELC Admin Guide.pdf ), which has it’s own licensing issues
- Though ELC stands for “Enterprise License Server”, it works for one-man shops equally well as for enterprises (heck: for enterprises it is likely more work as they usually want multiple groups of licenses users)
So renaming a machine will already invalidate your license (but you can usually restore that).
Background reading:
Downloads (.bin files are for Linux x86 or x86_64; .exe files for Windows Win32 or Win64):
–jeroen
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