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Well done TheRegister for staying with this saga.

This TLS issue with threats of switch off has been used by Sage over many months to coerce users to enter into subscription agreements who already own perpetual software that was costing them nothing to run previously.

Sage have known about the TLS issue since at least 2018. It should be clarified that some of the versions at risk are nowhere near 10 year old, versions at least as new as 2018 are impacted, possibly more recent.

Sage are quoted as saying “We have been clear with our customers as to what versions of the software were impacted” – No, Sage, you have not. You initially stated that all versions 26.2 and below were impacted. That incorrect information was in place for months. You have now corrected that (after hastily updating your website in September when you were caught out by users on another forum) to clarify that only versions 23.1 to 26.2 are impacted. Innocent error or maximising sales?

Sage also included more up to date TLS versions in some versions of the software for communications other than licencing, still leaving the bit that deals with licencing on the obsolete version. Sage have yet to explain why they did that. Could they have been keen to have a future justification to disable as many non-subscription versions as possible?

If Sage are genuinely offering free upgrades to customers who have support contracts without forcing them into a subscription then that demonstrates that they have a version of the software available to fix the problem for the other impacted users. This is in essence fixing a problem that Sage knew about when some of this software was sold and in any case they had had at least four years to plan a work around for the initial design flaw of the licence process being seemingly hard coded to be dependent on technology that would inevitably change.