I'm kinda old and forgetful; maybe some of the other people who've been with VNC Manager since the 1.x days can help me along. If I'm way off base here, I apologize in advance.
It seems to me that way back when VNC Manager was in it's 1.x days, before there was a standard and enterprise, we purchased it and the upgrade policy was free upgrades forever. As a non-profit, that excited us because there aren't many vendors that offer unlimited free upgrades for their product. Then came along the split between standard and enterprise. Those of us on the 1.x could continue to use standard for free or we could upgrade to enterprise for a reduced cost. We used 2.x standard until we were able to upgrade to enterprise. As far as I knew, there was still free upgrades forever. This is trusting to my memory because I couldn't find any of the old old versions to check and I don't have cached copies of the old yurysweb.com site to check on that. I went through the Yahoo group and didn't find a particular mention of licensing and upgrades. Can anybody else out there back me up?
I'm pretty sure that was the upgrade policy, and my coworker is too. I can respect that free upgrades for life may not be a desirable way to do business and that you may want to change it. I see the new section on the web site about the new subscription service, and that seems like a good way to perpetuate a more steady stream of income. However, it seems to me that those of us who bought it way back when have an expectation that the licensing/upgrade policy we purchased under was a perpetual binding agreement. It seems like there should be a grandfather clause to take care of those who purchased early on. At the very least, shouldn't we have had some warning that the licenses we'd purchased were going to stop working when you released the final version of 2.5? I was on the site and forums quite a bit since 2.5beta was first mentioned and don't remember ever seeing mention that current users would be unable to use 2.5 when it became the final version, and I know the subscription service is completely knew.
Some of you might be thinking, "what a cheapskate." What if your automobile manufacturer decided they were losing too much money on warranty repairs. Rather than changing from that point forward, they said to everyone driving one of their cars that their warranty was null and void. How pissed would you be? Sears tried to do that with their Craftsman hand tools, that have the lifetime warranty. Didn't pan out.
That's my bitch. Yury, I don't think you're wrong for wanting to move to this subscription plan with time-limited upgrade rights, but you should honor the agreements you made with the guys who paved the way for you to get here by buying your product back when it was just a side-project for you. Thanks for listening.