We’re eager to make this as painless as possible for everyone. I’m hearing a few different concerns here:
- I’ve purchased licenses I haven’t used yet.
- Sites running v8 are going to have a less desirable experience.
- There’s information about older add-ons that will be missed.
We’re not going to leave the old marketplace up for the public. Our goal is to make this easy as possible for everyone. Having two marketplaces is going to be wildly confusing. I can’t imagine the canned responses my team will have to write if we’re honestly expecting people to be able to navigate one marketplace for old stuff and a new marketplace for v9 stuff.
We’re not really committed to making v8 user experience delightful at this point. We’ve been talking about critical security updates only for a long time. There are plenty of old concrete sites from every version still out there. I certainly don’t want to brick any of them. Sure, I agree there are folks running v8 sites that cant or wont upgrade for fair reasons, but it shouldn’t be news to them at this point that they’re not on the latest and greatest. To be clear, we’re not actively doing anything that should impact those sites here. Developers are not releasing masses of updates for v8 extensions at this point anyway, so the idea that someone is in their v8 site hitting update on extensions and getting results today is pretty rare at all. The fact that these legacy sites no longer will connect to a marketplace feels reasonable and non-destructive. The scenario of someone being such an active manager of their v8 site that they would uninstall an extension, to then realize they need to reinstall it, only to be frustrated that we no longer have a copy of that extension for them here feels like we’re solidly into a very hypothetical scenario. If that actually happens, I’d suggest restoring from a backup.
To be clear, we never promised we’d do any of this. When we built the original marketplace a decade and a half ago SaaS was still pretty new and the expectation with software was you pay, you get a copy, you get a bit of support, you go live your life. We promised 30 days of support in our refund policy (not even the license) and we asked developers to provide 90 days of support in reality. That’s it. The fact that someone bought an image gallery in 2014 for $20 and has happily been getting updates automatically installed for no additional fee for a decade is frankly a miracle and a gift, it was never a must. The fact that folks like John have been making these updates without compensation for literally years is gracious, and unsustainable. It’s part of the reason we don’t see more high quality themes and the like in our marketplace.
As I see it… I have bought every major version of ScreenFlow Pro for a decade. It costs around $150 per major version. When I give them my old serial number, I might get a discount on the next year’s license - but that’s it. There’s no account history on their site where I can download every copy I’ve ever purchased if I lose that zip file. If I happened to keep a copy in my local downloads directory, that’s cool - it’ll still work, but it’s not Telestream’s job to be my software pantry. They sold me a copy, I bought it, that copy is mine, and we move on.
Similarly, I purchased Photoshop version 2.5 in 1992 for about $1000. Sadly, if I want Photoshop today, I get to spend $50/mo on it. I can’t fire up a windows 3.1 vm, login to adobe.com, download some archive from them and key in my serial number. If I had that box still running in the corner, it’d work, but it’s not Adobe’s job to keep it working forever just because I spend a grand on this 30 years ago.
We’re selling extensions for an open source product that average around $30 a pop. I’m not sure we can realistically be held to a higher standard than Telestream or Adobe here. Maybe I’m missing something?
So, that said, some thoughts that may help:
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Get stuff now. We’re being pretty loud about this for a reason. If you’ve purchased a 5 pack of some v8 theme and you’ve only used 3 of them, and those remaining two licenses are valuable to you, go download the zip from your license history and keep that copy for local install.
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We’re taking it offline from the public, but we’re not going to delete the marketplace itself; we’ll have access. If there’s a scenario we’re not seeing now (I’m sure there are many) and there’s an easy way we can make something right, we’ll be able to login as root or login as your user, verify what’s going on, and manually pull out a package to keep things on track. Feel free to use the contact form and we’ll handle things as they actually emerge on a one off basis.
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We can extend the reach of our v9 migration. We were just going to migrate licenses purchased in the last 12 months, but instead of that we can:
Migrate ALL licenses that are v9 related.
If it’s 9 months or more recent, set the expiration date to that date this/next year.
If it’s 9 months or older, set the expiration date for 90 days in the future.
That makes it easier for folks and it’s not a huge change for the import routines we’ve built, so happy to do things that way if it helps.
Again, we’re trying to move forward here with a stack we can actually support and a ecosystem that drives growth for the project. Part of that (by definition) means leaving some old approaches behind and embracing new stuff. I certainly want everyone to have as smooth as experience with Concrete as possible. Please do let me know what I’m missing here.
