NI have announced they will no longer activate discontinued products

[Sascha Franck]

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

Exactly. And as said above, they don't have to care about new OS versions. Having to update their products with each new OS isn't covered by their EULA - but keeping their activation system (or any alternative) intact on supported systems is.

To whomever at NI: Offering "great deals that nobody could resist" might be nice for most folks, but it won't even remotely solve the issue. There will be the odd folks unhappy with NI and they could just force NI to follow their EULA at literally any point in time in the future, should they still have a computer running a supported OS.

[Tj Shredder]

If it affects you, just wait and see what they have to offer...
I wonder how many participants in this thread actually are affected? I am not, but I feel with you all

And I want to be part of it as well. Anybody willing to sell Spektral Delay? I would install it into a virtual machine running Snow Leopard...
But hurry, it has to be before June... (The price has to approach zero of course, because there is competition on the market...)

[Sascha Franck]

That's nowhere in the latest EULA. You can find it here :
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/c ... agreement/

They changed it after Native Access was introduced if i'm not mistaken, and a few times after that.

It doesn't matter one single bit that their latest EULA doesn't say so anymore. For those older products, the very EULAs you've read and agreed upon when you purchased your license are valid.

[Sascha Franck]

Didn't Steinberg do that some years ago...just released a couple of their old synths for free...if my memory serves me (and I am the first to admit its haziness) a couple of their staff even did a bit of work on them, gratis, to bring them forward a bit...

In addition to that, IIRC, Steinberg even offered a free SX version which would load older Cubase VST projects for those jumping straight to a newer version which would not do that.

Linplug, while long off the market (quite unfortunately, IMO), still keeps their download site active for those who lost their installers. And obviously, you can as well still authorize their products, as all that is required is a serial number.

That's two examples of how you deal with such issues.

Again, seems to me that the EULA language is clear, and that if NI chooses not to abide by it, that would be the result of a pure business calculation that it is cheaper to defend against any possible lawsuit than continue to activate these products.

To me it rather seems as if they had massively overlooked something (as so often). You can more or less tell that from their reactions right now, trying to steer back from "we just quit it" to "let's see how we can help in some cases" already.

This is my gripe, I don't expect NI to support Absynth 2 on Mojave and they don't, it's irrelevant to the discussion. What's relevant is that someone running Snow Leopard or XP on an older machine is not going to be able to use their older authorized NI software that's compatible with it, if something goes wrong.

Exactly. I still use an old 2008 Macbook running Logic 9 pretty regularly (works just fine, so why not...). Might require a fresh installation one day, though (I have a fresh 10.6.8 installation image with nothing but the OS and Logic on it). And I could pretty well imagine to still want to use some of my older Komplete things on there. In fact, even if I never felt the need so far (right now the only NI plugin installed on that machine is Battery 3), I may just try to install some things on there in june...
Talking about it, another thing comes to my mind: Battery 3 isn't on the list of affected products. Yet, on said Macbook, it can only be activated using Service Center (Native Access requires a newer OSX version which I can't install on that Macbook). So, that's apparently something they overlooked. There's still plenty of those older Macbooks with Snow Leopard out in the wild...

The sad part is this isn't at all surprising to me as a long term NI user, they have a clear history of abandoning older software for even the most trivial of support, and it's always someone or something else's fault.

Yeah. But so far they were always able to get away with it legally. This time they aren't. And seriously, users should not let them off that hook. And no, I'm not a particularly mean person, I just hate all the tactics these companies (for me it'd basically be NI and Apple) are pulling off all the time.
Right now, I own three NI hardware devices, all in good condition, all rendered trash under OSX (Rig Control II, Machine I, Kore Kontrol /w interface). I also have a computer that should likely be powerful enough for the rest of my life (2010 Mac Pro) which will soon-ishly be rendered obsolete for no real technical reasons.
If I was into conspiracy theories, it'd look as if NI and Apple would be working hand in hand.

[Matt_NI]

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.

We wouldn't be able to do that since the old mechanisms are blocking development on the activation and serial front. We have to completely retire the older formats, this is one thing we simply cannot avoid. There is perhaps some possibilities with offline activation but we have to spend a bit more time investigating this workaround.

[Matt_NI]

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

That is what we tried to detail in the update - Service Center and the older mechanisms are not properly working and more importantly are slowly leading to all sorts of security issues. Additionally, there is a lot we are struggling with in the back end by having to rely on such old processes.

[Matt_NI]

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

While I agree this is something we could investigate for our own products, the list we provided also contains Kontakt libraries from other vendors. We wouldn't be able to provide free downloads for 3rd party instruments as you can imagine and most of the products (if not all) have already reached end of life on the manufacturer's side.

[Matt_NI]

Outside of the libraries, how many people are truly affected by this? I have been using Komplete for over 10 years and the only things on that list that I even have are B4 II and Pro-53, and neither of them is 64 bit compatible.

I think this is where the confusion laid internally. There isn't really a big amount of activation for all these instruments combined and that is probably why the team thought it shouldn't impact a large amount of people. We also reached out to every partners and all mentioned that these products have already reached end of life and a newer version is available. We genuinely thought we could accommodate users for our products and work with the rest to suggest suitable replacement with third party partners. I see that this was not the right move and we'll go further to hopefully find a suitable solution for everybody.

[Matt_NI]

Ok, let's be very serious here for once.

I'll quote this from your EULA again:

Should Native Instruments for whatever reasons no longer be able to fulfill its obligations to deliver the activation key, it will provide the Licensee with a key which ensures the continued use of the software independent of changes of the computer.

That's nowhere in the latest EULA. You can find it here :
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/c ... agreement/

They changed it after Native Access was introduced if i'm not mistaken, and a few times after that.

Yes it looks like it was removed even before that last update.

[ATS]

I wouldn't be surprised AT ALL if some of the people complaining and threatening to sue, aren't even effected by this.

[Matt_NI]

That's nowhere in the latest EULA. You can find it here :
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/c ... agreement/

They changed it after Native Access was introduced if i'm not mistaken, and a few times after that.

It doesn't matter one single bit that their latest EULA doesn't say so anymore. For those older products, the very EULAs you've read and agreed upon when you purchased your license are valid.

That's actually not accurate. For example, as soon as you login to Native Access you accept our EULA. You can find the mention on top of your login screen.
Also I'm not sure anyone here has access to EULA they agreed upon back in 2000.

[Matt_NI]

I wouldn't be surprised AT ALL if some of the people complaining and threatening to sue, aren't even effected by this.

Yes, like I said we can see the amount of activation on our end and it would be safe to say that a goof portion of people are not affected. With that said, I completely get where everyone's is coming from and why they don't want this to define how we deal with end of life.

[Gamma-UT]

Also I'm not sure anyone here has access to EULA they agreed upon back in 2000.

Those products shipped on physical media. If they’re on the shelf, you’ve got access.

Mine are on the shelf.

[imrae]

How can customers expect NI to honour other agreements if they wangle their way out of that one?

[EnGee]

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.

Really?! Is that how NI coders work?!
It's a call for one function passing it parameters. This function depending on an algorithm, gives a result and then passing this result to the user. It runs on the server side, make it run locally!
But do you have this code? Do you have capable coders want to work with that? Or do you (the CEO) have the will to pay for that change? This is the latest question is the real question. Now try to cover this with a Trump style won't convince us! You (the CEO) are just deceiving yourself. No, we are not stupid!

If it would be that easy, it would be too easy for those who want to crack it. Fact is you have no idea about the complexity of the problem. Its even that complex, that NI did not oversee it completely themself...
I met Tommy Haas decades ago, after he coded the Spectral Delay. Do you know what kind of agreement they signed with him? How should you, this sort of thing is plastered with NDAs.
I always think it would be the best for all sides to open source abandoned software. It happened with Surge, coded by Claes from Bitwig and is a huge success.
But there are more people involved to sort this out than are on the payroll of NI. Work and time is needed, please acknowledge that before you speak as „we...“!
We are not all stupid...

You have no clue what I'm talking about! I'm not talking about the Spectral Delay code I'm talking about the Service Centre code that attached to the installation of every old plugin! This is a client side that run on server side once you click submit or authorize! You proved you had no knowledge so