The company I work for has a custom program for handhelds. We bought tens of handhelds (might be a hundred by now, not sure) and installed the software on it. Unfortunately, we used Appforge to develop the software. The software requires real-time activation per-handheld device that the software is installed on. If we'd gotten the ISV license, no real-time activation per handheld would have been required, but the ISV license expires every year.
Now Appforge has closed (bankruptcy) and the activation servers have gone dark. We can't install on handhelds which we have licenses for because we have that activate-in-realtime license, not the ISV license.
Now, it wasn't my choice to go with Appforge, I'd have gone with J2ME or similar, probably. But we made the right decision at the time. Development in VB really *was* much faster than in J2ME or something else. We just didn't know that AppForge was in financial trouble. Next time we think about buying anything with similar "copy-protection" though, I'm going to put my foot down. NEVER buy anything that requires that the selling company still be around in order for you to use it. Open source is better, if it's available, but even for payware, if the company you buy it from can turn your service off at will (or when they go bankrupt), walk away.
1 comment:
The ISV toolkit itself is licensed on a per-year basis. So most ISVs have the problem that they can not even use their toolkit after the license expired.
http://81.149.78.146/Appforge/
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