I wouldn't give up. The problem should be solveable. Perhaps put up a kludgy temporary solution, such as buying a copy of VBulletin (under $200, i think) for your members to post messages and keep traffic coming temporarily.

Then, one approach might be to get together with a bunch of other licensees of the software and have an attorney send an immediate demand that the company send you unencrypted software or source, since their software is buggy and they are apparently incapable of fixing the bugs.

This would be an offer to accept source code, along with a permanent license to use it, in lieu of extensive damages for loss and damage to your business goodwill and reputation. I'm no lawyer, but you might also have a claim against the software producer for the implied warranty of merchantability (if you buy a toaster, it will make toast; if you buy a personals site script, it will give you a working personals site.)

The idea being to say "Look, your software is crap, but rather than sue you into oblivion for the sudden losses and damages I've sustained as a result of your inactivating my software and forcing me into older, nonworking versions, I will allow you to simply divorce yourself of supporting me and your crappy script if you'll give me the code so I can get it fixed elsewhere."

If you can get the source, then (assuming it's a reasonably self-documenting language or the code was decently written and documented), a good programmer should be able to figure out what's going on with it and maintain it for you. Particularly if the cost of the programmer is split among a bunch of licensees, the cost shouldn't be tremendous.

One more thing: If the data exists within MySQL, as the coder claimed in his post, you can at least export it and bring it in to some other script. You might also be able, if you have the original, non-encrypted script, to have a programmer figure out a way to bypass the expiration code long enough to look at the data and export everything through the application itself, if it was build to provide that...


Hope that helps!

Chip