Today I lost access to my UniVerse installation which means that I lost access to everything related to my blog entries. I am currently writing this in notepad as I'll need to relicense U niVerse and that will have to wait until tomorrow.
UniVerse is a propiertary multivalue database that is maintained by Rocket. Regular licenses can go for thousands of dollars depending on the license count. They also have personal edition licenses that are relatively limited. My biggest issue is that it requires communicating with Rocket and waiting for an e-mail. In the era of open source everything, this is something I'm not used to nor do I want to take part. Luckily I was able to get a dev license through work as I wanted to play around with the newer version of UniVerse before we switch to it and so I installed 12.1.1. As a note, everything stayed the same, I still need to get another license so I can play around with replication. If that works out I have some ideas on how to incorporate it here.
The dev licenses however need to be renewed each year and guess who forgot to renew it. I'm sure you got it write, but in case, me! I didn't renew my license and so here I am not using my own editor in my own environment and relying on something else.
The annoyance is real but the entertainment value is also real. I really enjoy seeing how stark of a reminder it is to not rely on things that need to be licensed. Right now I'm totally screwed. If I never get a license code, I would need to write scripts to rip out my data which isn't difficult but is annoying. This isn't something specific to Rocket but it does get at the heart of something I consider important. Unless you have the source code to something, you don't really own it and in the world of subscriptions and licensing, you own nothing.
To be fair, had I paid properly I would have UniVerse forever so I am being a bit dramatic.
Still, this is a shitty situation I have gotten myself into. I can't use my shell, I can't use my editor, I can't generate my blog, I can't do anything. I do most of my programming in BASIC and so I lost that as well. Wonderful.
Bah!