Observed
This morning, I opened ST with no warning, and SM was working happily last Friday (three days ago). After lunch today, no dark theme in SM, ST complains that it’s unregistered…
Edit: My personal Laptop just reported unregistered too…
System Info
I am using ST Build 4126 and SM Build 2068 on the Stable Channels, and every so often (weeks to months) both apps complain that they are unregistered.
I am using macOS Monterey 12.3.1, on an enterprise managed computer, which I have no clue of what they might be changing in the background that might cause this. Investigation of issue below.
My personal laptop with the same above details (however, it is not a managed device, other than by me, manually), and has not suffered these seemingly random un-registrations.
Edit: My personal laptop did the same thing that afternoon.
Workaround
Reading the Documentation pointed out in another thread for Portable License Keys, I am trying this as a workaround for the meantime.
tl;dr: Observations and Exploring the issue.
At the top of that document, it reads:
Sublime Text stores license keys in a format specific to the computer it’s entered on. In some scenarios, such as a home directory that’s shared between multiple computers, this can cause difficulties.
This sounds like my enterprise device management may be altering some aspect of my computer, that makes the encrypted license file unreadable.
In fact, I thought that some process might have been tampering with my license, maybe a developer in the management office who also uses Sublime and somehow had their settings pollute their deployments (I also used to do this kind of work in a previous life).
So my test was to pipe the md5 -q of my license to a file right next to it, and have a script that simply compares the current value to the previously stored value.
Low and behold the moment my Sublime Text complained about being unregistered, the script reported no such error, and I compared it manually and to a copy I zipped up after the manual pipe to file. Everything matched up: the License file did not change! But, whatever allows ST and SM to read their licenses seems to have.
Suggestions
Other than the above workaround of storing a plaintext license file in the documented location, I don’t know what I can do or suggest to my device management team.
I understand that the documented workaround may actually be the best solution, as proven above, the file was not modified and appears to be outside of our device management’s concerns.