On Sat, 2007-02-17 at 20:45 +0000, Dave Salt wrote: > There are products that don't require jumping through hoops to enter a key, > and if you ever use one then maybe you'll feel differently about them. And > maybe you could then go back to the other vendors and say "why aren't your > keys as easy to use as this?".
I can understand vendors wanting to protect their IP, and generate all the legitimate income they can. The problem I see is the plethora of schemes in use. Some products only get used by individual users, and key updates for them tend to be flat-file and picked up the next time the product is "called". Easy. Except it's the user that gets the expiry message, and that has to filter up to the correct (contracts) team who have to verify/authorise payment, and may even get the new key. Then it needs to filter back to some-one who can do the update. This may be a customer problem, but it's also a vendor problem if they get dropped because all the agro isn't worth the effort. That's the *easy* case - it's all downhill from there. - License STCs that need to be bounced with every key update. In 24x7 production environments ???. Do these people have any idea what that takes to get okay'ed ???. - stop all updates, switch to batch mode, re-cycle. Huh ??? See comment above. - unpack the XMIT'd load module, copy to running system(s) ... I have one customer that I do all of the above (and more) for. Telling the customer to swap out these products is not an option. Shane ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
