PE is **not** licensed for **ANY** commercial use, even temporary, stop-gap, limited, minor, etc. etc. etc.
The only thing you can use PE for in a commercial environment is development (on the idea more seats will ultimately be sold) or Personal (again, prior logic, the more you know it, the more you love it)... Porting is not either of those things. And the license doesn't say 'or commercial purposes for 3 months or less' (I don't think!!) We're not being mean or trying to extract another dollar from anyone by stating the facts. IBM has their rules on how these things work. It's the agreement we all entered into when we accepted the license to use the database. This customer can use their current environment perpetually with no additional costs, ever, but it seems they need to move to another platform - and for that, there is a fee to be paid to someone - namely, IBM and the new hardware and O/S vendors! If they are just moving data, they could buy a ONE or TWO SEATS in the workgroup license for probably way under $1000 - it's not going to break their budget - heck, I bet it's less than the consultant will charge for doing the research! <g> We have to be careful on the Personal Editions - they are not OURS to distribute (having a CD or copy of the download does NOT make you an Authorized Distribution Point!) or decide what they are 'supposed' to be used for. Those are legal issues covered in the User License. IBM decides what terms they want to offer - we don't. However, if we are not careful, PE versions may go away or become impossible to get without blood typing!! The most any of us can ever LEGALLY do is provide the URL to the PE versions (when they are back up and running!). I hope IBM makes gazillions of dollars off U2, because if they do, we'll make a LOT more! I don't think any of the policies or pricing I've seen thus far are that bad or unfair. This client has had years of use of the database for the one time, up front costs. It appears they are not under maintenance and have not kicked anything into the coffers for a while. And, IMHO, asking a customer, who after years of no maintenance needs to migrate to another platform, to cough up under $1k is not 'throwing money' at the issue. I suspect the data is worth a magintude more than IBM would ever ask them to pay! And that the consultant(s) involved will get far more than IBM will out of the deal. But the client gets the joy of continued access to the data - priceless. DW --------- snippage Come on people... I'm a software developer. I don't exactly go around suggesting people steal software. They need a temporary solution to get the data out. "Throw money at it" is rarely a good idea and for a temporary need almost never. Robert ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/ ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/