Clients Not Only Do Not Understand Dev Enviroments...

Dev environments freak out clients. Communication in this area requires a perfect touch, or you get problems like:

• What is Derrick doing?
  
• We don't have a license for that to run in dev.

The solution to the 2nd one is to make sure the development environment is secure, so you can do what you must, without commentary or other pressures. The fact about licensing is almost nobody, and really it is no body except some real asshole companies, has any problem with developers using their stuff in development. Sometimes the licenses will seem to indicate the contrary, but in reality, the company doesn't care, in fact they like they it means their stuff might getting good attention. The only exception I ever ran into is MM, because they have automation that detects where their stuff is installed, so you can get billed by them for a dev environment. I let that slide at first, cancelled whatever it was they were charging me for, and they charged me again. When that happened, I sent them a complaint, and they refunded retroactively at that point. I don't have the screenshots anymore, but their system said I was cancelled but there was something else on the screen, at the bottom that overrode that.

Here is the note I put into them. It happens to include an explanation of how client confusion of licensing for dev (they call it staging) as the cause of the problem.

Absolutely Furious!
Hey, that's a really good way to make money, make it really hard for people to figure out how to unsubscribe.


When I got billed last month, I wrote in explaining that I do not use membermouse. You gave me your asshole legally correct answer that told me basically to fuck off, there would be no refund. So I politely said ok, and I canceled my subscription.


Ok, so now you are going to tell me how I cancelled it wrong. So this time, may I please have support ticket to me me verify that I have successfully cancelled my subscription, and you guys are not going to bill me again?


I do not want to hear a word about how I did the wrong thing to cause this. If your overly rigid process for handling licenses for staging were not so prone to confusion and foul up, I would not have this problem.


So let me clarify. I have never run MM for a single moment for any purpose except to help one of YOUR customers make her system work for her. Under your system, she could have obtained a FREE staging license that would have addressed our needs, but even though she is smart enough to run a successful business, she found the staging license arrangements confusing and she did not want to violate any rules.


So, to be on the safe said, and to help her out,I signed up for a trial that provided me the license I needed to fix her system. That process was confusing and I ended up with 2 accounts that you assholes somehow manage to not hate yourselves to making me pay for, even though I get nothing from them.


So, congratulations, you have ripped me off or 40 bucks or whatever it is. You win, you and you kids will benefit and mine and I will suffer in the amount what you have taken from my bank account with terms of service to cover your asses against claims. And you have a furious, offended customer that thinks you guys suck.


Or, you could refund the 19.95 you just billed me.


p.s. Does your most release provide an easy way to get a report of all transactions for a given product or bundle for all members in one list? That information would be helpful for me to know.



​

 

They refunded $19.95 times two.

 

Nice!
So my next question is whether I am okay working with Holly's smiley set on my XF dev? Does Holly as the license owner have the rights to let someone work on the images on her behalf, or does she have to do all the modifications herself?

I could easily solve this problem by purchasing a license to use all of the smiley sets for myself, but then technically would the pixels I scaled be different from her smiley's pixels?

I guess sharing what I'm working on with Holly might have been inappropriate. However, if what I am doing is not the right way to go about it, I would be happy to do whatever it takes to work within the rules.

 

The only to answer is to read the license and have an attorney you trust who gives you boundaries you need know.

well, the only catch there is if if Holly ever gets the idea that she has been lied to, that could generate an unrecoverable loss of trust. Add to that a commitment she requires that nothing be hidden from her, you see the difficulty of this matter.

 

What I have done more than once is buy licenses of my own for the products she runs, then I run the stuff on my license in my development area. Even there, the catch is that anything in my dev for Holly;s stuff is basically Holly's. My licenses and payments for the servers get me enough latitude to do what I need to do. You could include the cost of the smiles in your quote to her, but she could haggle about that. So it is a cost you have to eat, and you need get paid enough to cover your costs. You do not have to provide details on costs at that level.

 

I will look into the issue of my working on images she owns. I'm sure there is an answer to that question, and a way to make it work, even if it means I have to purchase duplicates of the images for myself.

 

I did a bit of reading about licenses at Envato/Graphic River, where Holly purchased the smiley images, and it looks as if I'm in the clear as long as the smileys are only used in just one end product, which they will be. They seem to be more concerned with where the end result will be displayed, and not as much about who works on it along the way.



Since I'm not a 'company' that isn't as clear cut an answer as I would like, so I went ahead and contacted them directly. I ran into a bit of a snag.



I'm afraid you're rubbing off on me ...



Because I decided they needed to know of my distress:



Sheesh, with all this hassle, it might have been faster to draw them myself.

 

I have good news. The help department responded right away, and there are no issues in working with Holly's smileys, as long as I am sure to delete them off my computer and server when I am done.

 

That is almost always the license deal