🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 2181@sousa.ltn.dec.com, gibian@talent.ljo.dec.com (Marc S. Gibian) writes:
>
>A few comments on Dinah McNutt's posting on this workshop:
>
>1.  Digital is a software licensing product vendor, with probably
>the largest number of licenses in use today, and more to come.

Digital seemed underrepresented at the LISA licensing technical talk.
Perhaps this is largely due to the history of the technical talk which
grew out of the Sun managers BOF.

>2.  The posting includes a lot of points that address the defining
>of universal licensing policies.
[stuff deleted]

These points are really the examination of the battle scars of site
administrators (the LISA conference being targeted at Large Installation
System Administration issues.)  There are many horror stories of sites
dealing with vendors' licensing policies.  For instance, the definition
of a site license may range from 1 building to every building and computer
which is funded by the organization.  The former tends to be overly
restrictive while the latter could cause the vendor to accidentally 
license every site funded by the Department of Defense.  In either case
the system administrator is typically responsible for assuring compliance
with the license agreement.  Hopefully you can see why this is a problem.

It is obvious that there will never be a "standard" site license 
definition (hurrah!)  But something should be done to try to tame the
Crazy-Eddies.  Will the vendors do this themselves?  Not likely.  So 
the burden lies with the customers.

>3.  A software licensing product should only support/enforce the terms and 
>conditions a vendor may wish to use as their business model.  Just as
>trying to standardize terms and conditions is inhibiting to the conduct
>of business by vendors, so too would a software licensing product that
>forces a fixed model, or set of models, on a vendor.

I disagree.  The software licensing product should support the policies
of the sites they wish to sell to.  Simply, if you can't please the 
customer, you can't sell the software.  Unfortunately, the license
manager market has not matured to the point where vendors and customers
can agree on, and can implement, mutually beneficial licensing policies.

Given that any license management scheme can be subverted, what site
administrators really want is a method for helping assure compliance
to license agreements.  What this method looks like is up to folks like
the folks who hang out on comp.software.licensing to work out.

>--
>Marc S. Gibian			email: gibian@talent.ljo.dec.com
>Principal Software Engineer	phone: (508) 486-6598
>Digital Equipment Corporation	fax:   (508) 486-6648  or (508) 486-6100

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