>I have not >heard of a single legal case in the IT world, not just the MV market, >brought by a DBMS vendor against a VAR/developer for abuse of this common >communications design. I think any company that does so would be >committing political suicide, if it allowed its developer base to go so >long without action, and then all of a sudden claimed that accepted >practices and established connectivity products were now in violation of >their legal terms.
I am aware of Microsoft doing this. It has done software audits on even large organisations and clobbered then for breaches on SQL Server license. Oracle and IBM have stringent components of their contracts to enable them to do audits. I have had to sign distributor contract with IBM and it stated that they were entitled to investigate my client's sites to ensure that they have proper licenses. As the pressure is on the IT vendors to build revenues and IT spending is down, then sooner or later vendors are going to chase licensing issues to recover revenue. >Unless IBM publicly states their position on this topic, takes a developer >to court, or just sends a polite "please rethink your license consumption" >note to someone, we will not know how liberal they are about their >licensing, regardless of what their license actually says. My guess is >that no DBMS company will take action unless there is blatent abuse It is in the licensing contract and a breach of license can lead to criminal charges to Directors. Under SOX one cannot ignore this because one thinks it is unlikely to happen. IBM U2 is not ignoring this area and has already placed restrictions in the use of phantoms to contain this manipulation. Additionally: The examples you give are not the main issue that causes a breach. There are a number of applications where users connect and stay connected but through a 3rd party mechanism that channels tasks through one license to the backend that then distributes to multiple background processes. The intent of this process is not application convenience or style but more an attempt to avoid license fees and many advertise this. It is this avoidance of license revenue that can expose companies legally. I have discussed this issue with both jbase and MvOn as their products talk to Oracle or SQL Server and falls into a similar category where you really only have 1 process accessing the RDBMS, independent of the number of users on jBase or MvOn. Both organisations have very quickly pointed me to Oracle and Microsoft to discuss licensing issues and neither would publicly recommend that companies run using 1 license of Oracle or SQL Server. This is very much on the radar of database vendors. Regards David Jordan ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
