Jan 16 2009

Iron Speed Designer Licensing Issues

Category: Programming — lomaxx @ 1:56 pm

I’ve been using Iron Speed designer for a number of years and generally have had nothing to complain about. That was until 2 weeks ago when Iron Speed decided that I was using my license illegally and PERMANENTLY DISABLED my license.

They had basically decided that I was using my license key illegally and without consultation or warning canceled my license key. 

To understand the full story, you’ll need a bit of background information. The way Iron Speed activation works is that when you purchase a license you have to activate the license with Iron Speeds central activation server. When you want to use the license on another machine, you need to de-activate it on the current machine and re-activate it on the second machine.

This is an extremely annoying process, but at it’s better than not being able to activate your license on another machine.

This activation process isn’t flawless either. For example, on the Iron Speed website, they outline the backup procedure they want you to use. This is fine, however there is a situation where you can get yourself into trouble (like I did). The backup procedure backs up the activated license file so you can restore the license onto your machine and continue working. It’s really important you do this because if you somehow lose the data on that machine, you can’t activate a new installation of Iron Speed because the server already thinks you have an active license. Let me break the process down into some easier to understand steps:

  1. You purchase the license and activate it.
  2. You backup your data with the activated license.
  3. Your hard drive dies and you lose everything on the machine, including your Iron Speed Installation.
  4. You re-install Iron Speed but because you didn’t de-activate the copy before your hard drive crashed, you can’t re-activate it.
  5. You restore your backup copy of Iron Speed that you activated before the machine crash and everything is ok.

So far so good… however you have to be careful. If you haven’t worked it out yet, this actually provides a way to have Iron Speed activated on multiple machines at once without actually realising. My scenario basically played out like this:

  1. I installed Iron speed on Machine A
  2. I Activated it and then took a Norton Ghost image
  3. I then de-activated Iron Speed on Machine A
  4. I then activated Iron Speed on Machine B
  5. After a few months, I formatted Machine A and restored the Ghost Image with the Active Version of Iron Speed.
  6. I now had 2 active versions of Iron Speed on my one license.

The scenario is a little more complicated than that, however that is the short version of the steps that led up to the following.

Without warning or consultation of any sort, the powers that be at Iron Speed decided to DISABLE my license.

The thing that worries me most about this is that Iron Speed doesn’t disclose on their website anywhere that they are able to disable your license. They don’t even so much as mention that they log all usage of Iron Speed. During my emails back and forth between Iron Speed and myself, I found out that they log all usage of all instances of Iron Speed, not just activations and de-activations. They also log the IP addresses that the usages come from.

So after numerous emails explaining exactly my situation and being completely up front with Iron Speed, they still won’t re-activate my license. Remember this is a license that I purchased and now am no longer able to use due to a fairly honest mistake. I was in the process of considering whether to upgrade my license to Iron Speed 5.2 or not, but as it turns out I will never be dealing with Iron Speed again.

The point is, that if you make licensing hard, you’re going to end up losing customers. Same goes for purchasing as Ayende points out. I fully understand that Iron Speed is a business and they need to make money, but annoying customers is hardly a good way to do it.

It kind of reminds me of a post where Jeff Atwood recommends a few suggestions for avoiding piracy:

In fact, the most effective anti-piracy software development strategy is the simplest one of all:

  1. Have a great freaking product.
  2. Charge a fair price for it.

I think adding a third to that list probably wouldn’t go astray:

    3. Don’t punish paying customers for using your product

 

Jan 12 2009

NHibernate Components and Null Values

Category: Programming — lomaxx @ 9:22 am

There’s a feature in NHibernate that allows you the map a series of related columns in a table into a smaller class called a component.

A common use for components is to have an employee record with a ContactDetails subclass and group all the contact details into a component which is mapped to the ContactDetails subclass.

This is all pretty straightforward however there’s one little gotcha that you need to be aware of. The NHibernate documentation states that:

Like all value types, components do not support shared references. The null value semantics of a component are ad hoc. When reloading the containing object, NHibernate will assume that if all component columns are null, then the entire component is null. This should be okay for most purposes.

The section in bold is particularly important because NHibernate makes the assumption that if all the columns in the component are null then the compent itself is null. When using components you need to make sure that your code caters for this situation. The main concern you will have is assigning a value to the component when it is null, so you’ll have to make sure that all assignments to a component check for null.

Otherwise, components are a pretty cool feature.