You bring up an excellent point. I was thinking about this a bit when this thread first started.
Would you agree, though, that mainframe users tend much more to be legal than personal users? IBM can audit any of their mainframe machines at any time. And the large businesses that use mainframes tend to be much more honest because of self policing, with all sorts of auditors and so forth to keep things legal. They have too much to loose to get stupid and steal software. I like you brought this up, but I think it is a somewhat weak argument. What about usage based pricing? A company could just fudge the usage reports and save tons of money, no? I'd really like to know what IBM's stand on this really is. Regards, Lindy -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tim Hare Sent: Monday, June 11, 2007 8:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Patents, Copyrights, Profits, Flex and Hercules "what does IBM really have to lose?" I agree that licenses of some sort need to be accessible to the small developers; however if a "hobbyist" license is granted, how do they keep it from being abused by unscrupulous companies who then run their business on the "hobbyist" machine rather than the "commercial" mainframe license (that they dropped once they found they could get away from it)? ..... Tim Hare Senior Systems Programmer Florida Department of Transportation (850) 414-4209 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
