mIRC ended its lifetime license agreement with all who purchased its software 10 years out reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IvyCainTS · 2022-12-09 14:25 And they wonder why users pirate instead of buying when they kick their loyal users that support them in the teeth. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Matteo5150 · 2022-12-09 14:53 AdiIRC all the way ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-12-09 14:55 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- loulan · 2022-12-09 14:59 The author acts like it's concerning that doing this is legal. It's not. It's just that nobody bothered to sue the developer. There are probably very few people who use mIRC nowadays and nobody bothered to do it. Honestly the developer is pretty stupid to act like this. All he had to do was to create a brand new version with a different name, mIRCPlus or whatever, and only update that one like it's a different application, leaving the old mIRC versions to the users who paid. Then it would be perfectly legal and way less risky for him. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SadieCat69 · 2022-12-09 15:09 Nobody is pirating because the software they spent $20 on 15 years ago won't be getting any more free updates lmao. Ain't nobody buying food and paying bills with loyalty either. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SadieCat69 · 2022-12-09 15:20 Can't really blame Khaled for changing his mind on this tbh. There's declining numbers of new IRC users but the ones that do exist still demand bug fixes and new feature support which costs time and money. The alternative is he just does what a lot of other IRC developers have done: quit working on it and let it rot and I think that would suck even more for everyone. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- badpie99 · 2022-12-09 15:40 This is a very good point. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- trekkie1701c · 2022-12-09 17:21 I think my major concern is it was done in kind of an underhanded, non-transparent way that kind of just implies that he feels comfortable changing the license terms whenever. That to me would be worrying in that if he ever decided to change the license to 1 year or month to month or whatever he could just use the same excuse and I'd be yet again out the money I paid for it. Coupled with there being plenty of free IRC clients out there with comparable (or better, although not necessarily overlapping) features it makes it a hard sell for me to want to give him more money. Can I trust him not to suddenly change the terms on me again? Is it worth it when I can meet my needs with an open source client? It's not a lot of money. But he changed the rules with no notice to get more money, and it's just difficult not to be concerned that if I rely on his software that one day it'll just randomly demand that I pay him much sooner than I was expecting to. So I guess I can't blame him for changing his mind. But I do blame him for going about it the way he did. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jasazick · 2022-12-09 18:52 Exactly. * Close development on v7 with a promise to fix critical security issues for another year or two. * Create mIRC v8 with a couple of new features. * Add an upgrade path for v7 to v8 that does not include a lifetime license. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- digwhoami · 2022-12-09 18:57 Like I wrote in another sub, tried yesterday with a fresh mIRC install and my license from 2010 worked just fine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paradox · 2022-12-09 19:26 Just sell bouncer service, and make it mIRC+. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tjhart85 · 2022-12-09 20:07 This happened 3 years ago and affected licenses that were purchased 10+ years before that. Doing some *very* basic math: 2022 - 3 = 2019 Licenses were disabled for accounts that were 10 years or older: 2019 - 10 = 2009 ​ You bought your license in 2010, so that would mean you weren't affected! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Araxen · 2022-12-09 20:20 I switched to Hexchat if I need to get on IRC. It's just as good. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-12-09 20:31 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-12-09 20:31 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- twoOes · 2022-12-09 20:47 You can use irssi for the CLI and hexchat for GUI ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2022-12-09 21:18 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- digwhoami · 2022-12-09 21:37 Ah ok, makes sense then. Had no idea the policy change were three years old already. Thanks for clarifying. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IvyCainTS · 2022-12-09 22:08 Then they shouldn't offer something they can't / won't honour. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- m1ss1ontomars2k4 · 2022-12-09 22:28 >Again, a bold move that doesn’t quite walk the line of honesty. How is this not honest? "I effed up and didn't charge enough" is not honest? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- m1ss1ontomars2k4 · 2022-12-09 22:29 Nobody would sue because what would they get in return? You can already get a new license for free by emailing the developer. What are they gonna demand? Their 5 minutes back? EDIT: Also breach of contract is typically a civil matter, not a criminal one. You can breach a contract all you want, and it's not illegal. But you can be sued. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- hazeyez · 2022-12-09 22:38 Please tell me who the hell was buying Mirc licenses prior to 2009? The cracks were so easy back then you literally just dropped a DLL or INI file in your mirc folder. Voila! Nowadays idk how easy it is but idc. I am a 25+ year Mirc user, and I'm not a poor kid anymore I have 3 licenses for 3 different machines. Of all the things I pay for I'm more than happy to pay for Mirc, I'd even pay a $10 annual fee just to support Khaled and his team for keeping it going this long. What we really need is some new 3rd party Mirc scripting sites! That is not what it used to be! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- otakugrey · 2022-12-10 02:56 Who......is out there in real life actually *buying* IRC clients? Is this real? I don't believe it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SadieCat69 · 2022-12-10 04:37 They honoured it for a long time. Much longer than most software developers do. I think mIRC is one of the few proprietary applications from 1995 that is still actively maintained in 2022. Nobody, including Khaled, was expecting it to still be maintained for this long. Would you rather they stopped maintaining it and let it rot? Based on what has happened with other proprietary clients it would take about 2-4 years to start getting banned from networks because of security vulnerabilities and after a decade it would no longer be able to connect to networks at all because of parser bugs and TLS version mismatches. Does that really sound better to you? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- justkeepingbusy · 2022-12-10 04:58 Imagine spoiling a bunch of concrete interwebz cred by pulling shit like this ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SadieCat69 · 2022-12-10 05:45 Some of us actually like the software we used to still be maintained. IRC has a massive sustainability issue because most people expect their client/server/bouncer to be maintained forever but refuse to ever pay or donate for it. I know of more than half a dozen IRC developers who have gone to work on proprietary systems and at least two IRC developers who have gone to work on Matrix instead because unlike IRC people are willing to pay them to work on that. The end result of this is that most IRC software is on the boundary of becoming abandonware. Its not good news for anyone who wants IRC to have an actual future. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OneofLittleHarmony · 2022-12-10 05:53 I emailed the developer and never got a new license. Works because I went out and bought a new one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OneofLittleHarmony · 2022-12-10 05:55 Yeah. My client wouldn’t work without it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OneofLittleHarmony · 2022-12-10 05:56 I did. It was an offer for something else I bought. I still have the original email with the license…. And the renewal I had to buy. =( ---------------------------------------------------------------------- otakugrey · 2022-12-10 06:54 Really? I've just been using weechat and hexchat my whole life. It's an open protocol with open source clients and severs maintained for years. This is all news to me. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SadieCat69 · 2022-12-10 07:44 Being an open protocol or having open source clients doesn't mean that there will always be people willing to maintain software. Most developers of popular IRC software that I know are experiencing burnout and are only doing the bare minimum to keep their projects alive because its hard thankless work to maintain a large project on top of a full work week for no or little pay. Especially if that software runs on a platform like Windows which requires you to do packaging and distribution on top of development. I'm one of the better paid individual IRC developers and currently I'm getting [around $250/month in donations](https://github.com/sponsors/SadieCat) most of which is coming from other IRC developers (thanks IRCCloud <3). Most IRC developers are getting nothing for their hard work. Compare that to Slack where average pay is [$140k~/year](https://www.comparably.com/companies/slack/salaries) or Discord where average pay is [$130k~/year](https://www.comparably.com/companies/discord/salaries). I work full time on IRC software and the only reason I'm able to keep up development on InspIRCd and other IRC projects (e.g. most of HexChat's recent IRCv3 support was implemented by me and I've put at least 50 hours into porting it to GTK 3 this year) is because I currently live in a cheap area of a country with tax-funded healthcare and have a decent amount of savings but ultimately that won't last forever. If IRC is to have a future we need to find a sustainable solution where maintainers can get compensated for their work. Personally I'd like to see more of the for-profit corporations that use IRC software actually pay for the maintenance of the software they're using like happens with projects like the Linux kernel. But honestly I don't think that is going to happen any time soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- otakugrey · 2022-12-10 08:46 Thanks for the detailed answer. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MachaHack · 2022-12-10 09:49 "This is a lifetime license" followed by "actually I didn't charge enough so it isn't", some years later with no provision in the license for it leaves the first statement as dishonest. They weren't lifetime licenses, they were 10-year licenses ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Individual-Escape-31 · 2022-12-10 12:40 And this is why I use IRCCloud, easier to use too ---------------------------------------------------------------------- gunfart · 2022-12-10 21:35 i just entered my registration code from march of 2019 in a copy of 7.71 i installed a week or two ago and it validated ---------------------------------------------------------------------- groenewood · 2022-12-11 02:17 What company doesn't do this? OSes and hardware are abandoned all the time, to the point that you can't even obtain the old non-updated drivers from companies that are still in business. The only fig leaf of cover that is really required is to change the name of the product, and sunset the old agreement. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- platzbo · 2022-12-11 16:05 He could set up a Patreon account and ask for donations for all I care. All those people who purchased a lifetime license it should be honored still. He could be sued for making changes for those who already bought it. It would be justified. If he wants to make changes for new customers go for it, but it's retarded to change something, pulling a rug beneath your feet. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- platzbo · 2022-12-11 16:07 So you got scammed out of your money. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OneofLittleHarmony · 2022-12-11 20:29 Basically. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cS47f496tmQHavSR · 2022-12-12 10:49 Just do what the Sublime Text devs did; stop supporting the old version, allow an upgrade to the new version for a reduced fee. Repeat that every few years and you keep money coming in ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jh20001 · 2022-12-13 15:03 Def not the way to handle things ---------------------------------------------------------------------- deepend_tilde · 2022-12-29 03:52 I only bought it because Once I was an adult and had some extra cash I felt buying it at least would somehow make up for pirating it for so long when I was young. So even though I've basically hardly used the client since I bought it years ago. I bought it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- platzbo · 2023-01-02 23:16 Looking at the FAQ page now it doesn't show any expiration but he does ask for support if you can. Did he make any changes to the page since this article came out? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- magnum7385 · 2023-01-27 17:58 Did you say you've poured 50 hours into porting HexChat to GTK3? I know where my next donation is going: YOU.