Blog Post
Hi,
is this actually legal ? By making the files read only as of Feb 2026, you are ACTIVELY disabling perfectly functioning software effectively terminating the perpetual license which we paid for.
Why do you have to make it read only ? No one is asking you to provide any support/fixes etc, simply do NOT make it read only & allow the activation server to continue to confirm files & you can leave this alone for the next 20 years with any issues being the users problem for continuing to use outdated software (a choice - remember those ?)
I have a massive suite of excel macros which we use in our production & payroll systems, the current versions of your software after more than 8 years still do NOT offer the same degree of data access via ODBC or similar (your API is severely limited) so you are going to impact our ability to run our business at all.
This pretty much amounts to extortion, you are forcing us to goto a new piece of software at a huge cost & redevelop all of our integrations when we have a perfectly working piece of software that we paid a perpetual license for, your ONLY cost is to maintain the activation service so this smacks of a strategy to force the hand of people like myself to upgrade.
Please reconsider the read only stance, I'm happy to run the activation server on my network if that is a problem for you.
Cheers,
Phil Webster
Hi Phil_mtc
MYOB have tried this twice before and reversed their decision after a lot of protests on here. There are fewer Classic users now so a Class Action is less likely but you could still report this to the ACCC to see where you stand. I think a lot are just paying the third party to save themselves the stress of going through this drama again which is why there really doesn't seem to be as much of a reaction on here as before. It could also be that they aren't aware of it yet - I haven't received an email about my 40 files but another Forum user had been notified and emailed me so I looked on here.
Cheers
Liz
