Sublime Forum

Did Sublime auto-updater just revoke my license?

#1

I rarely update Sublime Text since I don’t consider editing “passive” text files to be a security risk (and what is not broken, don’t fix), but today I happened to accidentally tap enter on the startup prompt to update to a new version.

Then I though “what the heck”, let’s let it do the autoupdate thing for once.

Now after the update, the title bar has a nag text “LICENSE UPGRADE REQUIRED”.

Did I just auto-update the software to revoke my license?

I thought “ok, no sweat - maybe just the license file format changed, let’s do the upgrade step”. But then on the upgrade page, I realize that Sublime is asking me to shell in $80.

This should never happen. I am pretty sure there was no mention when I purchased my license that the license would be only valid temporary until an unspecified date in the future, but I entered the license agreement in the understanding that it would be valid in perpetuity for the given product edition of the software that I installed.

A new licensed product should really be placed behind an explicit product upgrade option that visibly states that an upgrade will entail a need to purchase a new license so that customers will know to make a deliberate choice.

This kind of move comes off as shady, and I feel having gotten tricked into purchase by an autoupdate dialog - one which was accidentally activated by starting to type on a text file, pressing Enter, and before I could react, the download dialog had popped up and the Enter key activated an automatic update.

Is there a way to revert the update back to the latest version to which I still have a valid license, or did clicking on autoupdate permanently revoke my license?

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License and auto update
#2

Just to be clear before anyone might misinterpret. I have nothing against Sublime Text offering a new product and asking for $80 for it. I do congratulate Sublime for a new a product launch - but I do not think that I signed up for that product, and access to my previous product license was pulled from underneath me against my will.

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#3

Your ST 3 license is still perpetual for ST 3. However the latest is ST 4 now.

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#4

Thank you for the reply.

So should I uninstall Sublime and reinstall ST 3 again? How do I prevent the autoupdater from redoing the same stunt on me again in the future?

Is ST3 development now concluded and there will be no updates done to it anymore? Should ST3 users disable autoupdates to avoid getting migrated to ST4 by the update?

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#5

If you want to rollback to ST 3, it’s can be downloaded here.

Since you are a licensed user, you can just put the following in your preferences to disable update checking.

    "update_check": false,

Yes, from what I learned from developers, unless it has a bug that makes it unusable.

I see no reason why people want to see a update popup every time ST starts when they obviously won’t update.

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