On Thu, 20 Apr 2017 10:13:21 -0700, Phil Smith wrote: >Having worked for a variety of vendors, I've been on the opposite side of this >issue, and I have to agree 100% with the customers. Yes, there's theoretical >risk of folks stealing software; de facto, however, in over 30 years, I've >seen exactly ONE such case. And it wasn't deliberate: it was a case of having >stood up a second system and forgotten to notify us about use of our product >(which didn't use keys, obviously). That resulted in a red-faced customer and >a full-price, retroactive bluebird sale, so nobody was unhappy, except maybe >the sales rep who would have had the account back when the system was first >stood up (in this case, the rep hadn't even changed). > As customers, we once dealt with a vendor who perused a bug report and noticed an overseas timezone. We were running the software on a processor for which we thought we were licensed, but the vendor pointed out that the license was a site license for any user on any processor within a geographic perimeter and was not sympathetic to our argument that the processor was within the perimeter even though the user was logged in to it remotely.
We negotiated a settlement. I should mention that the unkeyed software I mentioned earlier supports hardware from the same vendor and was hardly likely to be useful except to customers of that hardware. And I recall an ISV on this list some years ago who defended the position that his product was licensed not according to the processor on which it runs but according to the source of its input data. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
