Your math is incorrect - $60 to $99 is not “more than double”. Neither is $120 to $199.
We have never made money from the Linux version. In the entire history of LightBurn the Linux user base has maybe paid one developer salary for one year. We’ve existed now for 6 years, and have 9 developers.
We were already doing that. You can download an AppImage of LightBurn 1.7 right now. It still doesn’t resolve library conflicts among the dependencies themselves, or address the cost of writing OS specific libraries.
Now you’re getting into tin-foil hat territory. I’m sorry that inflation exists and increasing costs have meant we had to make some changes, but it’s been over 3 years since our last price increase, and many new features have been added to the software. The same Big Mac you were getting 3 years ago costs 40% more, and they haven’t added anything to it.
I’m happy to have a conversation, but at least try to be civil. We know people aren’t happy about the Linux situation, but we can’t justify spending the amount of dev time it was costing us to support 1% of our users. We’re in the process of automatically renewing every Linux license key to allow all our existing Linux users to update to 1.7, so you don’t have to pay to renew, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
I’m not a Linux user, but for clarification to those that are. Does this include any maintenance updates / bug fixes to the 1.7 release or is it limited to the initial 1.7 that just released yesterday?
The way we now do releases, anyone eligible for the initial release is also eligible for all patches to that release, and that goes for everyone, not just Linux.
Our bug fix releases (anything where the Z value in X.Y.Z changes) never change the license validity. So if your license if valid for 1.7 then it’s valid for all bug fix releases that come out for it.
We are actually in the process of a complete re-translation of ALL supported languages in LightBurn and will be putting out “bug fix” releases that include those updated translations for v1.7. We decided to do this because:
We were unfortunately unable to get all the retranslations completed before v1.7 was released
We decided it was the right thing to do - make sure that the final version provided for Linux had the best translations possible.
Those updated versions of 1.7 with the translations will be coming in the next month or two and if your license is good for 1.7 today, it will be good for those patch releases as well.
I’m sorry I opened THAT can of worms. My only intent here was to get advice to help me make an intelligent decision for my case.
This was my original post as a happy Lightburn user since 2020 and I am the one who marked this thread as answered because my original information needs had been met.
While I’m not pleased with the choice to stop supporting Linux versions of Lightburn, I certainly understand the reason and don’t hold that against the management or staff.
As a FYI - we’ve retroactively renewed the license keys of all users that have activated LightBurn at least once on Linux to expire today (if already expired)
That means that everyone that has ever installed on Linux can use LightBurn 1.7.x into the sunset.
