Penalized by the release of VCL UI Pack

Hi,
I saw this being discussed on blog comments but I think this deserves a post.
People who renewed a few weeks or month before the release of VCL UI Pack are being penalized in their licences.

For example, we renewed at 9.2
The VCL UI Pack release caused a jump of 7 subversion all the way to 10.0.
So that means we get VCL UI Pack only up to 10.2 and that also mean we paid full renweal price for only 3 subversions since it has been advertised that TMS Component Pack and VCL UI Pack are the same thing.

It has been written that "For your convenience, for a while we will simultaneously keep offering access to TMS Component Pack v9.x. So, users with an active TMS Component Pack license will get both TMS Component Pack v9.x and TMS VCL UI Pack v10.x and users purchasing a TMS VCL UI Pack license or upgrading to TMS VCL UI Pack will also still get access to TMS Component Pack v9.x."

If I understant correctly, that means that you want to be fair and that there will be a Component Pack release all the way to 9.9 to cover a full version cycle?
If that is the case, I noticed that some recent changes and fixes made to VCL UI Pack have not been applied to the Component Pack.
Are you intending to not update Component Pack anymore?
For example, the fix below was applied to VCL UI Pack 10.0.2.0 and not to Component Pack (last update is from from Jul. 18 2019):
 Fixed : Issue with specific VCL Styles in TDBAdvGrid in combination with column settings)

When you renew, you get the up to a year or update or a full version cycle (whichever comes first).
As a show of good will, may I suggest that you drop the full version cycle part clause for people with 9.x licences to ease the transition to 10.0? We would get the full remaining time of the 1 year left from the time we bought the renewal.
This would allow us to use the VCL UI Pack which is said to be the same thing as Component Pack without feeling penalized. You would also not have to bother updating both VCL UI Pack and Component Pack anymore.
You dropped the licence renewal from 2 years to 1 year to respect indistry standards. Unless I am mistaken, this industry standards also covers a full year no matter what. There doesn't seem to be a notion of a full version cycle (whichever comes first). So maybe this full cycle clause could be dropped permanently?

This is our humble request as a long time customer who helped by reporting many bugs!
Thanks for your time as always

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty.  I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.”  George Carlin


What you see as "penalizing" (an action that does not even come into our minds when working to serve our customers), we see as investing in the future. We doubled the team working on VCL UI controls, we worked for over 6 months to adapt and iron out as much as possible with respect to high DPI and per monitor DPI support, to adapt VCL controls to make these VCL styles aware, we added two major totally new VCL UI controls, we extended the PDF generating library, we reorganized & revamped demos... In its lifetime, we never invested this much into VCL UI controls development. We moved the entire build process to a new build server that allows us to release the same day in case serious issues are reported. Given the major work on almost every aspect of the TMS Component Pack, we decided to rename it to align better with our other product nomenclature and to bring clarity. And combined with this, given all the work that went into it in the past 7 months, it was decided to put the version on 10.0. 

With respect to period of support for users purchasing 9.2, it is premature to already claim today that it would be shorter since v10.2 is still far away in the future. It is not even sure that we'll reach 10.1 this year 2019, let alone v10.2.

With respect to updating TMS Component Pack, yes, it is the intention to keep adding bug fixes to it but clearly with a lower frequency than TMS VCL UI Pack. The TMS Component Pack build takes a lot more manual work to do than the TMS VCL UI Pack build. I am sure that most will prefer we devote our limited resources to adding value to the TMS VCL UI Pack with improvements and enhancements than spend hours on making new builds of a replaced product. We initially thought we would get more request for TMS Component Pack new builds with fixes but the transitioning of TMS Component Pack to TMS VCL UI Pack went so surprisingly well that this post is actually the first such request. 

I hope this clears up confusion, brings perspective & balance to the situation and brings more understanding.

Bruno Fierens2019-08-09 11:05:56