Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Barry Wiseman" <barry at gensoftdes.com>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2007 9:42 AM
Subject: Re: Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash


> Brian K. White wrote:
>> Converseley, lets look at some already done deeds, simple facts and 
>> history,
>> anything that has had a licence manager that got in my way has gotten 
>> erased
>> from the face of my universe.
>>
>> SCO, gone.
>> Vsifax, gone.
>> Facetwin, gone. (oh it's still on most boxes, but we don't need it 
>> anymore.)
>> Backupedge, gone. (though I would still highly recommend, practically
>> require it for traditional single_server_no_IT_guy shops.)
>> Doublevision, gone.
>> I'm probably forgetting some.
>
> To me, Backupedge is a perfect example of license management that 
> *doesn't* get in my
> way.  Their licensing is keyed to the machine's hostname plus the end-user 
> company's
> name and address data.  These are unlikely to change when upgrading or 
> when replacing
> dead hardware.  Upon initial install, the product runs under a demo 
> license that is
> fully functional for 60 days.  Plus they will relicense, no questions 
> asked, with a
> simple phone call.  Of course, we're speaking of a company that actually 
> answers
> their phone....

I have had BE's license break on me when imo it shouldn't have. As in, I 
paid for a copy, and was only trying to use that paid for copy in approved 
manner on the same box it was originally installed on, and hadn't used that 
serial number on any other box. And it required a support phone call to fix, 
which meant waiting for their business hours to come around. I think it was 
a hostname change, or rather, a change in what BE resolved as it's own 
hostname.

And it is true that I don't use BE on most of my boxes,

But that said, I really have no problem with BE as a product or Microlite as 
a company. I probably should not have lumped BE in with this group in this 
context. It sounds like I resent them and really I don't. There are a few 
different reasons why I don't use BE on most of my boxes but they are mostly 
simply that BE isn't the right type of product for those boxes. Sort of like 
how I also no longer use Olympus TuneUP. TuneUP's license is very strict 
also, although I don't seem to remember it breaking especially easily, or 
causing functional breakage while the licence was broken (I think the 
current modified kernel continues to run and continues to have the same 
tuned-up settings, but merely you can't adjust them any more, other than to 
revert back to pre-install) but mostly it just doesn't apply to me any more 
as it is simply a SCO-specific product. BE basically just doesn't apply for 
most of my boxes, but it's not any sort of fault or failing.

I also wish to point out that it may look/sound like I went on some kind of 
pogrom to purge software but that wasn't the case and isn't what I was 
trying to express.

What happened, and what I was trying to point out was simply that if you 
don't cater to the customer, and the customer has any, even a slight, 
incentive to look elsewhere, he will. Maybe only passively, and maybe 
without success for a long time, but if it persists, he will most likely 
eventually find something else more to his liking. One's only hope is to 
keep pleasing the customer so that they do not want anything else, and when 
presented with something else (perhaps via competitors marketing even if the 
customer wasn't actively looking) that they continue to choose you 
voluntarily because you simply give them what they want better. I was trying 
to show that this is just what happens naturally over time as a result of 
the incentives involved, and show that it's not just a biased theory that 
can be safely disregarded, but something that has actually come to pass 
several times already and is an ongoing process still/currently. Most of 
those other products didn't even have the benefit of this heads-up ahead of 
time. I simply quietly developed a hylafax system that does everything I 
need and when it was good enough I stopped using vsifax and thats all ther 
was to it. Vsifax never saw a customer complaining on a mail list. This 
happens all the time everywhere, it's hardly just me.

filepro, even with the simple licence file in 5.0.15 not even the licence 
manager daemon, is functionaly broken for me. I can't use it. I actually can 
not use it. I can't live with the potential for even 12 or even 6 hours of a 
box being down due to a broken filepro licence while we wait for filepro's 
business hours to roll around. Early mornings happen to be my customers 
highest critical time and losing half the morning until 8 or 9 am astern or 
central comes around is not tolerable.

Even if there was a way for me to self-generate a temporary working license 
or if the license went into a grace period mode automatically to get through 
situations like that, I still can't allow myself to depend on something that 
will occasionally stop working and requires someone else to fix. Two words: 
Menu Master. Heck, SCO just announced that they might fold up shop too. Good 
thing I no longer need them to generate valid serial numbers and activation 
codes huh? Why am I safe from SCO's evaporation today? Because 2 or more 
years ago I worried about exactly this eventuality and started working 
towards the solution. So We'll keep buying 5.0.14 seats as long as they are 
available and when they are no longer available I don't know what we'll do, 
except hope I don't absolutely need filepro anymore by that time. Since that 
would be a huge undertaking (we've all heard the 5 million dollar failed fp 
oracle migration lawsuit story), I had better start now and work hard at it 
as much as possible. Is that _really_ what you want me or anyone to be 
thinking and working towards fP?

For every one of me who speaks up like this, how many do you suppose are 
thinking and doing the same thing quietly? Hint, facetwin and vsifax and sco 
and doublevision never heard a complaint like this from me. Like most people 
do in most situations, I just took care of business and saw to my own needs 
and didn't make any big fuss about it, and simply stopped buying their 
products and they protected themselves to death. Granted, you're in a better 
position than say facetwin. There are lots of terminal emulators and there 
is little to make one terminal emulator special over another. Whereas it's 
several orders of magnitude more difficult to replace a database engine and 
programming language. But that just means it takes longer, not that it's not 
possible or that the same incentives and logic don't apply.

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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