Yeah, Ilia’s been refactoring and improving the license manager on the website and for our monitoring of usage data, but I don’t think there’s been clarity in those changes about what we have allowed in the past and what we ought to allow, and how we ought to communicate that. And, Ilia might not even know what I used to say about development/backup license use. We didn’t discuss it while we he was developing the new features.
One of the things we found when Ilia improved our reporting is that a lot of folks are using multiple servers with the same license (beyond just two) and ignoring the gentle warnings and such. We used to just spot check things and I’d manually poke around in the database now and then to look for big license abuse. So, I think he’s gotten more insistent about server counts and maybe it’s gone too far (and beyond what I’ve said in the past was OK).
I’ll talk it over with him and see if maybe we can go back to ignoring a second server if it’s either got 0 domains or the same domains as the other server. I don’t know how to really achieve that, though, as we don’t gather that kind of data and we don’t really want to collect a lot of data about our customers (what we don’t collect we can’t leak). I don’t know how to balance all that with Ilia’s reasonable desire to make sure we’re getting paid for what folks are using (we give away so much already, it sucks to have someone decide they want to use Pro features on a bunch of servers but only pay for it on one).
Honestly, we’re not trying to be annoying, and I’d like to do as much as we can to make Virtualmin low-hassle/low-annoyance, especially for development tasks. We’re just trying to make this a sustainable business. I know we’ve been around for a long time, and it can seem like it’s working fine. But, honestly, it never has made enough to be a sustainable business. Without me and Jamie volunteering most of the time, and Ilia working for cheap, it wouldn’t exist because it simply doesn’t have the budget to exist without a lot of volunteer labor.