Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash

[ken white]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Campbell" <bill at celestial.com>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 8:48 PM
Subject: Re: Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash


> While I fully understand the reasons for licenses and license managers, I
> will not use any product for mission-critical systems (i.e.  accounting or
> other systems where inability to run the system can put a company out of
> busines without access to their data).

I agree completely.

> We stopped upgrading and developing systems on Unify when Unify changed 
> the
> licensing of their RDBMS, on which we built our accounting applications, 
> to
> use a license manage with licenses that had an indeterminate expiration
> date, and were keyed to something in hardware that would change during a
> restore.  There was no way I would subject our customers to a situation
> where there system might become unusable if (a) the license period expired
> or we had to do a crash recovery and could not get support immediately to
> make the license work.  The lack of support might be because it was a
> weekend or the licensing company went out of business.  Whatever might
> cause the situation would be totally out of my control.
>
> Microlite has been extremely responsible in the way they handle licensing,
> particularly in allowing emergency restores.
>
> We have customers who have been using our applications for over 20 years,
> far longer than the lifespan of many software vendors.

I agree with Bill here,  I hate license managers which tie themselves to a 
machine on what I consider mission critical applications.  The license of 
Edge vs. filepro are in two different leagues. If the license manager in 
Edge fails there are multiple methods of creating other backups.  When 
filepro's license manager crashes for whatever reason people are idle.  The 
LM is my reason for me NOT recommending the upgrade from their previous 
version of filepro. When we do move above 5.0.14 I have to explain to the 
customers the downside of this license scheme and cross my fingers and toes 
that I do not get burn several years down the road.

It seems that fp came up with this scheme with three purposes in mind:
1. To allow *clerk  when used from a system call not to require a seat :-)
2. To allow fp to release one set of code for all user counts :-)
3. To control unscrupulous consultants by placing the other resellers at 
risk :-(    I am sure Barry Wiseman's client is pleased with him at this 
time.  I would also bet the time he spent on the license issue goes 
unbilled.

To add to the list of failed products with license managers under SCO add 
reform,  greatplains for unix.