After an OS upgrade, a program I bought awhile back – Perfectly Clear – wanted me to enter my license number, which had worked fine up until then, to use the program. It then said that license was invalid.
The program had been bought by EyeQ and apparently they sent out an email 2 years ago saying they would no longer support the program and it was being replaced with Radiant Photo. (If it was sent to me, I missed it.)
I’ve never had an instance when support for a program meant that my purchased license became invalid and I couldn’t use the program any longer. Even with Photoshop, once they went to a subscription model, I could keep using my purchased version (do I remember correctly that it was Photoshop version 6?) up until it could no longer work with an updated OS.
I had something like that happen to me. I had a license to CoverScout from equinux, which I used to create CD case covers. It was a 32-bit app, so the licensed copy I had stopped working with the Catalina upgrade.
My plan was to reinstall it in a virtual machine. I knew that CoverScout had issues in High Sierra, so I tried installing it in a Snow Leopard VM.
Here’s where I ran into the support issue. CoverScount needed to contact a license server to register the license on the new machine. Transferring the files related to CoverScout didn’t prevent that. The problem was that older macOS couldn’t make an HTTPS connection to the license server, probably because of the TLS version used in Snow Leopard is no longer supported.
Equinox said they no longer support it. And they were unwilling to do anything for me. Such as, give me a version of the program without the license check.
The lesson I learned is to put this company on the black list.