Rants Do Make A Difference

One of the reasons I rant on this blog is to let out some steam. However, deep down I also hope that my rants will help make a difference in some way other the other. I know that my rant on the Flexnet licensing (see “My Flexnet Nightmare“) started some activity at PTC. My Twitter rants on the subject also reached Mathieu Baissac, the new product manager at Flexera Software, the developers of Flexnet. Mathieu contacted me and we started an email conversation, which was basically me telling him exactly what I thought about his product and him patiently listening.

Among other things I wrote to him:

“As a software developer myself and a person who wrote the software licensing system employed  in my products sold the world over I can tell you that a software licensing system adds absolutely zero value to a software product when it works. But when it doesn’t it reduces the value of a software product to zero.”

I also pointed him to my earlier Flexnet issue that took two weeks to solve (see “NX For Mac Licensing Problem“). He passed this feedback to his engineering team. As it turns out the Mac issue had been previously reported but had a low priority. Last night Mathieu informed me that the priority of Mac issue had been elevated and that the issue would be fixed in the next release.

He wrote to me: “I take all rants seriously – because typically for every rant there are 10 ‘mumblers'”.