I'm often the voice of dissent here. Let me throw out a few counter-thoughts.
Bruno Sugliani wrote "we don't care (sorry about that) about the sharks robbing the poor salesmen" and he's right, of course. It's not your (the customers') problem if our (the vendors') salespeople have difficulties doing their jobs. But there's a bar in San Francisco with a sign that says "we cheat the other guy and pass the savings on to you." The converse is also true. Every dollar that a software company fails to collect is a dollar less that is available to fund enhancements, support staff, new hardware, and yes, the profits that attract investment in a capitalist economy. To some extent, you suffer from the software company's problems. I basically did and do trust the customers. My theory was that few customers would base a mission-critical process on stolen software, and few would pay 5-digit prices for software that was not for a mission-critical process, so license keys at best prevented people from running copies of our software that they would not have paid for anyway, such as a programmer who loved our product so much that he took a copy with him for personal use when he changed jobs. Such thefts may have impacted our pride, but not our bottom line. As I said in an earlier post, I put the keys in primarily to control trials, not licensed customers. However, trust or not, several customers subsequently came out of the woodwork with "we didn't know that group was running your software on that box." I believed them, but I still cashed their checks and used the money to help fund our company. Contrary to what some of you may think, a small software company is not a license to print money. We struggled many months, and came very close twice to shutting our doors. Another factor in license keys that many of you may not have considered: distributors. Most small software companies sell overseas through distributors. It is my impression that for some reason, the business of distributing foreign software attracts a disproportionate number of outright thieves. The software publisher needs keys to control the activities of the distributor, who otherwise can sell software (to unsuspecting and trustworthy customers) and pocket all of the money. We shared a British distributor with a small software company whose name you would recognize in a heartbeat, and that I think has a reputation with most of you as "nice guys." We jointly discovered that our common distributor had stolen tens of thousands of dollars from us (by selling and pocketing the revenue from feature upgrades that were not protected by our key technology) and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars from this other company, which could ill afford the loss. (It was not because their software was not protected by keys, but rather because they had given him the key generator, that this was possible, but the principle is the same.) Was it Ronald Reagan who said "trust, but verify"? Hasn't even IBM gone to less and less of a "trust" model? Are not the restrictions on z/OS.e, for example, enforced by technology that is somewhat analogous to keys? I would love to see a common, universally-accepted system that was easy to use and presented little burden to all concerned. IBM sort-of tried with their license manager. Even if a more technologically acceptable system were to be developed, it would also face anti-trust hurdles, because the US Department of Justice looks very unfavorably on any vendor collusion with regards to terms of doing business. (That's one reason there is no single common software license form that multiple companies all use -- wouldn't THAT make life easier?) Until something better comes along, I think keys, administered in an intelligent and customer-friendly manner, are the best solution to a problem with no really good answers. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Day Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2007 5:27 AM To: [email protected] Subject: License keys for ISV products(What alternatives are there?) The current discussion on license keys prompts this. If an ISV doesn't use a key tied to a date and a machine serial number, what other mechanism is there to insure there are no pilfered copies of the ISV's product running somewhere, and the ISV doesn't have a clue? From a user's perspective, if l ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
