Thanks again for a thorough and good answer John!
Just a feedback on the workarounds:
This clearly doesnât work since the problem is that the upgraded V5 licenses are handed out FIRST to any user who gets a license. So if you are late to the party youâll only get a V6 license.
Here I would say that this works agains the whole purpose of Zoo since you prevent others from using your license. BUT this can work IF you are early at work and get a V5-V6 in the firstplace.
This doesnât work since they already have PURE V6 licenses too.
So to solve those issues then I guess they have to trade those back in and then buy V5âs and THEN upgrade those. Since a v6 license wonât let the users open V5. (But that is both expensive and takes a lot of work, for them, for us and for you)
The best solution IMO would be to upgrade ZOO so any v6 license also work as an upgraded v5 license. That would solve this problem, and frankly I can not see how that can be so hard to implement. Nor that it is a problem regarding how users use their Rhino license. I think it would be a good thing if all V6 users were able to download, install and use Rhino 5 as much as they like. For both stability and backward compatibility for plugins.
Covering the logic of all the different license combinations and not being able to make any changes in V5 complicate this problem.
Sadly, itâs not nearly as simple as you seem to think.
Weâve know about this for a little while now.
If it were easy to do, we would have done it already.
We do understand the issues.
I know you work on the issue, and I do not think the final sollution is a simple one to accomplish. They never are, but the sollution in it self can be simple. Remember that Rhino is used by thousands of problemsolvers daily so I am sure you can find a sollution to the problem if you let us beat at the obvious while redifining the problem at the same time.
Good luck and God speed!
I disagree with JB - it will work great! Upgrade your V5 for Mac lab, and your V5 for Windows lab, and youâll have 60 V6 licenses available for both platforms (when Rhino for Mac 6 ships).
Actually, it was a design decision - this problem is not likely to get fixed anytime soon, because it requires a considerably more complicated conversation between Rhino and the Zoo.
No matter what, if your licenses are mismatched, we have to assume that the Zoo will make the wrong choice when handing out a license. Either it will give out a non-clustered license first, and then the user will want the other version - or vice versa.
When the wrong thing happens, somehow the other Rhino would have to give back its license to the Zoo, and get the one from the cluster. This, it turns out, is hard.
So really, for now, and the indefinite future, the best option is to have all your V5 licenses upgraded to V6.
Yes, thatâs pretty clear⌠concerning
However as that event is still on the more or less distant horizon, my question above concerned what happens now, today when one has this situation. This is not a theoretical question, I have several schools - including the one I work in - that have mixed platform labs. We have one each Mac/PC lab licenses in a Zoo on the school server. We can upgrade one or both licenses to V6; the question is which is the best way to go now.
If we upgrade both lab licenses to V6, then both the V5 (Mac + PC) licenses are linked to the V6 licenses, so as you said
it is indeed possible that Windows-side users will check out V6 licenses that are grouped with V5 Mac licenses until theyâre gone. So my recommendation is only to upgrade the Windows lab license now and wait until V6 for Mac is released before upgrading the other.
Windows-side users (who will have only V6 at their disposal, I donât think we will leave V5 installed) should be able to get up to 30 licenses.
Mac-side users should also have access to up to 30 licenses because the V5 Mac lab license is intact.
Very good point. And I think youâre right that the best solution today is to only upgrade the Rhino 5 for Windows licenses to Rhino 6.
Could you not upgrade the MAC version to accept PC v5 licenses instead?
It seems to me that it would be less work to unify the V5 licenses now in an upgrade than to struggle with handling them as separate entities in the future. v6 is unified already, and nobody understood why v5 was separated in the first place anyway. (other than to prevent users to buy a cheap mac licenses and use it on a pc)
I assume nothing has changed here - I have a client who is requesting to upgrade 1 of their 11 V5 licenses to V6 to test - but of course I cannot guarantee they will have access to their V6 license when they need it. Itâs also pretty hard to tell them âjust upgrade all 11, itâs easierâŚâ That wonât go over well.
What also doesnât go over well (with me) is to have to write a long and detailed explanation for the client as to why it doesnât work, which the client will have trouble understanding.