It seems like there’s been some misunderstanding on how server app licenses are supposed to work on DC. Our expectation was that any server license and renewal for it purchased before September 03, 2019 will work on DC until the maintenance period expires.
We made this conclusion after reading an FAQ here:
and Ben’s comment here:
As it turned out we were wrong. If the maintenance period starts after Sept 03, the license will stop working. To illustrate with an example:
A customer has a license that was purchased Feb 01 a few years back and they keep renewing it every year. August 2019 they purchased a renewal for Feb 2020 to Feb 2021. Our expectation would be that such a license will work, but the reality is that if the maintenance start date is after Sept 03, 19, it won’t work regardless of when it was purchased.
We already know a few partners who ran into this problem, so apparently we are not the only ones. As far as I understand, Atlassian does refund these renewals, but this doesn’t solve the problem. The pricing for server renewal and a DC subscription can be quite different and some companies do not have the budget to switch to DC this year (as they were expecting they are all set).
If I understand correctly, another problem can be that some clients will not see there is this problem until their active maintenance expires, which can happen any time in the upcoming months.
Has anyone else seen this problem? We are considering sending a notification to our partners and customers on this issue, but maybe there are better ideas. Unfortunately there is no way to tell how many instances with such “unusable” renewals there are. We only can learn a client is using DC when they switch to the DC license.
Thanks,
Eugene