NI have announced they will no longer activate discontinued products

[moshimoshi]

I don't know why companies pull stunts like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Yes of course - but my point is - surely it makes people less inclined to use your stuff. I use some Komplete 7 stuff and I wonder how long until that's also on the chopping block because it's too ancient? It just makes me want to stop using the stuff of theirs that I use. No chance I would buy anything else from them. I can't believe people are asking for vouchers as some kind of recompense. I'd be thinking more of a class action lawsuit tbh.

[EvilDragon]

Planned obsolence doesn't play into this case at all, none of the products from the list were ever planned to be obsolete. I would also posit that NI back then couldn't even fathom that their ecosystem would grow to the size it did in two decades. It was more likely lack of foresight rather than anything premediated and planned for.

Best example: older RAS serial number schemes only had numbers, and the first three numbers were the product ID. This means once NI hits 1000 released products (this includes each individual Kontakt Player library!), they would not be able to generate new serials. Lack of foresight - Kontakt went up to be the go to sampler for 3rd parties and 1000 products was very easily reached in about 14-15 years. This is what required an updated authorization method (RAS3) which was debuted with Native Access, and serial numbers started getting letters in them. However, Service Center has no idea at all about serial numbers with letters and doesn't know how to handle them, so it got deprecated, and now discontinued. And it's not just about SC itself, but the whole back-end pipeline behind it. This stuff is not fixable, which is why NA was necessary. A clean start.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

Yes, technically not as straight forward as one may think but there is some room for action

One solution (well: not exactly a solution, but certainly an incentive that works towards lessening the hit to us long-term NI fans lol)

Your Summer of Savings drops right about the EOS for some of your older products, right?

Make us deals that we can't refuse - maybe vouchers *in addition* to the 1/2 off that we normally pay for upgrades, etc. during the sale - is that something that you guys can manage?

I believe that was actually part of the original idea especially with customers affected by the end of life of our own product. I would need to get more details on that but that is definitely something that was mentioned. I think for now everyone is sort of focusing on what can be done technically here and once we have a better understand of where things will go, we'll start detailing what can be done with specific deals.

But that completely misses the point i.e that these are libraries bought and would still like to continue using. Most of the NI products on that list have proven, even after all this time, to be irreplaceable. And the third-party libraries seem to be still very much in use by many.

[moshimoshi]

Planned obsolence doesn't play into this case at all, none of the products from the list were ever planned to be obsolete. I would also posit that NI back then couldn't even fathom that their ecosystem would grow to the size it did in two decades. It was more likely lack of foresight rather than anything premediated and planned for.

Best example: older RAS serial number schemes only had numbers, and the first three numbers were the product ID. This means once NI hits 1000 released products (this includes each individual Kontakt Player library!), they would not be able to generate new serials. Lack of foresight - Kontakt went up to be the go to sampler for 3rd parties and 1000 products was very easily reached in about 14-15 years. This is what required an updated authorization method (RAS3) which was debuted with Native Access, and serial numbers started getting letters in them. However, Service Center has no idea at all about serial numbers with letters and doesn't know how to handle them, so it got deprecated, and now discontinued. And it's not just about SC itself, but the whole back-end pipeline behind it. This stuff is not fixable, which is why NA was necessary. A clean start.

If a bunch of unpaid crackers can hack it without the source code, then it is fixable. Anything else is just sheer laziness.

[EvilDragon]

That is just about completely unrelated to everything I wrote in the post you quoted. I was explaining why SC had to be deprecated then discontinued. Also, the goal here is not to completely bypass authorization on the affected products ("hack it"). The goal is to retain the possibility to have them authorized legitimately in some way.

[Gamma-UT]

This is what required an updated authorization method (RAS3) which was debuted with Native Access, and serial numbers started getting letters in them. However, Service Center has no idea at all about serial numbers with letters and doesn't know how to handle them, so it got deprecated, and now discontinued. And it's not just about SC itself, but the whole back-end pipeline behind it. This stuff is not fixable, which is why NA was necessary. A clean start.

And yet no-one considered the option of issuing replacement serial numbers that would actually work in NA...

I know, stupid, right? No-one ever generates new serial numbers for stuff. It's unheard of.

[EvilDragon]

Not when there's a black box involved. Or two. Or three. There's a bunch of complications in there.

[Echoes in the Attic]

Of course it does, you cannot expect them to go back and manually hack over 60 products (most of which won't even install on latest Macs, for example) and stop the presses on everything else. That is not the only way to resolve this.

They had over a decade to deal with the issue. As easy as that.

And if the relevant language was in the EULA all this time, they should at least continue to allow authorization of these legacy products while they figure out a more permanent solution. The EULA is an agreement, after all, and it would be reasonable for any given user to say that they purchased the license (at least in part) based on the explicit representation in the EULA that if NI could no longer provide an activation key they would provide the Licensee with a key that ensured the continued use of the software.

Exactly. The relevance of the EULA is when software is purchased. Otherwise the EULA means nothing. They could sell a product with a certain agreement and change it after some people purchased the product. If it's only the new modified EULA that matters, then there was no point in having the original one.

And by the way, this move doesn't currently affect me at all. But am heavily invested in NI and I don't particularly want them to piss everyone off and do poorly in the future as a result.

[moshimoshi]

That is just about completely unrelated to everything I wrote in the post you quoted. I was explaining why SC had to be deprecated then discontinued. Also, the goal here is not to completely bypass authorization on the affected products ("hack it"). The goal is to retain the possibility to have them authorized legitimately in some way.

tbh I doubt anyone gives a shit about the technical whys and wherefores. All I hear from NI is a lot of bleating about techie crap but not a peep about the EULA which is actually all that matters here

[darsho]

It is working right now with Service Center.
They could just have kept it that way.

[EvilDragon]

SC doesn't work on newer versions of macOS, is not secure enough, and doesn't and cannot support RAS3 within its framework and back-end. So no, it couldn't have been kept that way.

[DarkStar]

Is this a silly idea?

-- change Native Access to support the older formats of Serial numbers (but I see that, for example, Strombreakz has 5 sets of 5 digits which looks like an allowable format),
-- add Offline Activation to Native Access,
-- change the NA server to generate a suitable Activation Code
-- send it back as a Windows Registry update / whatever OSX needs with instructions to the user.

There probably won't be too many at any one time, so perhaps they could even be handled manually by NI Support.

[highkoo]

The Company Men are f**king depressing and frucking gross.

[EvilDragon]

Is this a silly idea?

-- change Native Access to support the older formats of Serial numbers (but I see that, for example, Strombreakz has 5 sets of 5 digits which looks like an allowable format),
-- add Offline Activation to Native Access,
-- change the NA server to generate a suitable Activation Code
-- send it back as a Windows Registry update / whatever OSX needs with instructions to the user.

There probably won't be too many at any one time, so perhaps they could even be handled manually by NI Support.

The whole point of making NA in the first place was moving away from supporting the older activation methods, though, so that is unlikely to happen. There are other ways of dealing with this, let NI explore what's technically feasible from their side, they know their back-end and API better than we do.

[Broken]

Any software NI are no longer going to support should have the CP removed and be offered for free download.