Hi Ken,
I understand the concern you and many other AI users have as I have had the same experience when I first wrote AI. I purchased a licensing/key code generator program so I could create licenses for AI.
It worked well for a few years and then without warning, the company that sold it disappeared. Since the licensing it used was tied to a specific computer, when I upgraded computers, I lost the program (including all of the customers I had entered into it).
At that point I decided to just write my own licensing software to get around that ever happening again.
Now I understand that my solution is not viable for most AI users, however there are 2 things in place that will help you retrieve your data.
1) The database where all of the data are stored (aidb.mdb) is a generic microsoft access-type database with no protection on it. Therefore it is very easy to extract your data from it without using the AI software (there are many, many programs out there that can read this database).
My guess is that there are also at least a handful of AI users that have the software skills to do this. Going a step further, something could be written that exported the data from the aidb.mdb database and imported it into another program.
So at the end of the day you are always able to get at your data even if you cannot get another copy of the AI software.
2) There are steps in place to ensure AI continues to work even if I disappear from the face of the Earth. Of course if that were to happen there would be no further updates and that could cause issues if Yahoo! changes its format, for example.
It would be better and easier for me if I didn't have to worry about licensing issues, unfortunately with the ease of copying software and transferring it around the world, I do have to worry about it.
I think that no matter what software you use for AIM, you'll face the same issues in that once the developer stops supporting it, for whatever reason, you will eventually see it degrade into something unusable -- regardless of whether it has copy protection or not (that's just the way technology works).
As some have suggested, there's always the manual approach, but to me that seems like an awful lot of work to do and you can forget about trying to backtest or create charts and graphs. I've found that the most light shed on how AIM behaves and the most increase in my understanding came by running numerous backtests under various scenarios, not by working through hundreds of cases with a pencil and paper.
Technology is there to help make tasks easier and while some might like to stick with the old way of doing things, most people will use new technology if it is easy to use. As an example, I just purchased three rather large bookcases. Putting them together was a bit of a chore as I had to screw in no fewer than 200 screws. If I had stuck with my old manual screwdriver, I would probably still be assembling them and my wrists would not be happy. However using my cordless drill zipped me through the task in a couple of hours.
And that's what AI tries to do and what I hope it does for all of its users out there. I certainly appreciate everyone who have purchased AI and had the confidence to enter their important financial data into it and act on its recommendations. And although nothing is certain, in the worst case scenario, as I've mentioned, no user's AI data should have to be lost.
I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.
