On Feb 16, 2007, at 2:40 PM, Charles Mills wrote:
I have a lot of experience as a mainframe software vendor. I totally
understand what you are saying.
The other side of the coin is that some customers abuse software
vendors. At
my former company, we had several of what we called "the trial from
h---." A
prospect would run a trial forever, with excuses like "my boss is
in a bad
mood, I'm not going to bring a license in there for him to sign
today." If
the salesman after months and months of exasperation threatened to
send him
a legal letter, he would say "I can tell you if you do that we'll
never buy
your product." The poor salesman would not know what to do, and the
free
trial would drag on and on and on. Our average 30-day trial went
from about
180 days to 90 days when we added an expiration date, and that was
a good
thing.
-----------snip------------------
Charles I have seen examples of good/bad ISV's and also bad customers.
Yes I have seen customers steal software, yes I reported it to
management and was promptly ignored.
I don't know if there is a good answer to the issue myself. I would
prefer (personally) that any solution would be dynamic, ie no
recompiles, change of passwords nor require IPL's or have any impact
to the system (like stopping an address space) .
If it can be accomplished with the above conditions I am perfectly
happy with serial numbers.
Ed
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