I too was misled by the update dialog. This is a truly terrible way to handle this.
What I want to know now: Is it safe to downgrade to ST3 or do I have to redo my whole configuration? I did not back it up since I assumed this was just a bug fix update.
Thanks @bitsper2nd, I appreciate it.
Of course the first thing that pops up after the downgrade is the update dialog. How has this not been disabled yet? Just disable it for now and prepare a final ST3 build that includes a proper update notice - which actually informs users what is happening. Otherwise the whole ST3 user base will be misled into updating to ST4. And I really hope this was not the intention.
I’m not sure how they are handling it, but clearly this was something that no one thought about. No one in the beta test had this issue as ST4 beta was allowed under the old license. I think it was simply one of those things that got overlooked, and now it is painfully clear that it was on oversight.
I was just replying to the statement “there’s just a small “Upgrade Required” title which can be ignored …” which I felt was not true. I was happy with version 3, which I have paid for a licence for, and I didn’t expect to be upgraded to version 4 without my knowledge or consent and then told in capital letters that I don’t have a licence for something that I didn’t ask for and and haven’t decided whether I want to upgrade to or not.
It should be my choice to upgrade, not something that is forced on me unexpectedly.
Well it is your choice to upgrade. Nobody is forcing you. You could have easily cancel it. Now if you want to return to ST3 and avoid update prompts altogether then follow these steps.
Everyone who is complaining was slightly inconvenienced, myself included (I had to downgrade back to ST3). I get why people would argue users are just whining, when they can easily downgrade and/or ignore the titlebar (the only cost of being unlicensed).
That said, this is still a major loss of trust and the ST team is not showing enough contrition. This is absolutely a dark pattern, and in my view as bad as if one day ST started showing ads. Hopefully ST will swallow their pride and come back with a more aggressive response (with recourse) than “our bad”.
Yeah, a PR statement probably would be a good move. I honestly don’t think there was any sneaky, dark, or malicious intent. I was a beta user for ST4 for a long time. We all knew what the new licensing terms were going to be. This issue just never surfaced due to the way we all had access without needing a license upgrade and the fact that we all understood already the licensing plan moving forward and that it would be in effect as soon as the official dropped.
We simply had a different perspective due to the way it was presented and the lead time we had before the official released, and no one really thought to anticipate such an outcry as it wasn’t presented the same way as it is to non-beta testers.
I also think Merge, which uses this same licensing approach, was a test for this approach, but it still hasn’t been 3 years yet, so no one has experienced the sudden upgrade to an unlicensed version yet.
It is easy to look back and go “oh, that didn’t go so well” than it is to anticipate such problems. It is definitely pretty obvious now that the upgrade system, as it stands now, gives a bad impression. But yeah, it probably wouldn’t hurt if Sublime had an official statement saying “yeah, this should have been handled better, but we have a fix coming”. And pin that statement 
.
That’s what I think gets lost on this forum. Yes most of us were slightly inconvenienced, and yes we can easily downgrade, but none of that was clear for a while until they started reacting to our complaints.
I would say things are OK now, they apologized multiple times, most of us didn’t lose any data, and the things we assumed were true about our licenses are still true.
Again, it’s just that there was a period during which none of that was certain or clear.
Well, except for the fact that I get paid to write code. I don’t get paid to research why an update seemed to break my registration. I know it didn’t break it but that certainly was not known at the time. I don’t get paid to uninstall unwanted upgrades and I don’t get paid to reinstall previously installed (and paid for) software. This was an uncalled for interruption to productivity that cost me money. Not a lot, certainly, but enough to be noticed.
If you value your development time that much, you should have done your due diligence and investigated before doing the upgrade. This is no different from blaming python and windows when you decide to upgrade and suddenly programs/packages are not compatible with the newest version.
You know, I get it. Good software isn’t cheap to build, and I’ve been happy to support the Sublime team. I’ve bought licenses for Text and Merge, and I use them professionally every day to build software. I’ve recommended them to many friends and coworkers because not only do I like the tools, but I think well of Sublime as a company. Unfortunately, my formerly positive opinion of Sublime is now sullied by the way you have not communicated this change. I’ve come to trust you to not deliver negative surprises in your updates, and now I have to think a lot more carefully before I update any of products.
I don’t think anyone appreciates suddenly discovering they owe a not insignificant amount of money to keep using a tool. Keeping out of date or unlicensed software on my work system is not an option, for both company policy and industry regulatory reasons. Did you email any of your license holders about this major change? You had my email, you could have proactively communicated that a) a new version of Sublime Text was coming (with shiny features!), b) that it was going to require a new license, and c) that you were offering a discount on upgrade licenses for a brief period of time.
Instead you didn’t tell any of us that this was a major version upgrade when the update dialog appeared, nor did you mention the change to the license terms, and you did not document them in the otherwise excellent change log. You only included it in the announcement post linked in the changelog, which most of us obviously didn’t look at because for most companies those blog posts are largely a marketing message about the update.
And to those of you who say “you should have known ST4 was coming”, ok, maybe fair, but I never use bleeding edge or beta quality tools professionally specifically because they tend to cost time and money due to the bugs and often rapidly changing feature sets. My job eats up enough hours of my life, I’m not interested in surrendering more of it due to tools that are not production ready.
Sublime, you need to do better. I’m going to suck up this expense for now, but after this I’m much more likely to give competing products in the marketplace consideration than I was before this happened.
Removing the License Upgrade Required is easy. Just purchase a license for the new ST.
This is easy. Downgrade to ST3 and keep using your perpetual license.
Sublime Text is a tool. Not a person. You don’t seem value time that much if you are here complaining in the first place.
Unfortunately the solution of simply reinstalling ST3 doesn’t seem to work that well - I get an error about an incompatible package now when I open ST. Presumably the package was automatically updated when the upgrade to ST4 was made, but it isn’t downgraded automatically when reinstalling ST3. I’m sure I can reinstall the package, but really this shouldn’t be necessary. The software shouldn’t be prompting automatic upgrades to the new version while looking like it’s just an update for the current version.
@djeyewater that’s exactly why I haven’t tried to reinstall ST3 yet. Thank you for that insight. I need to wait for enough down time to deal with whatever issues that might trigger. I keep hoping that ST (the organization, not the tool) will step up and provide a way to automate the reinstall of ST3 and the restoration of ST3 packages. It may be as easy as some say but your experience says otherwise. ST (the organization, not the tool) seems to have gone dark - or at least taken the weekend off - so I’m not holding my breath.
Another user here frustrated enough to actually create an account after being a user since SublimeText 2.0. You really shot yourselves in the foot with this one, ST team.
Facts:
I’m gone. Goodbye.
All my packages from ST3 work on ST4 and viceversa. You can literally run ST3 and the new ST side by side.
Good bye, will! You won’t be missed.