phew!

[Allen J Michielsen]

In article <1990Apr7.081638.1374 at eng.umd.edu> smaug at eng.umd.edu (Kurt Lidl) writes:
>Why does the ugly spectre of VMS licensing agreements have to
>rear it head in U*ix?  I want a nice little (?) operating system
>that will just run the damn code that I put on it, without
>seeing how many "users" are logged into the machine and so forth.
>
 
   Sorry, I sorta disagree strongly.  I see what you are trying to say, etc,
but there are other considerations.  I see & talk to every day many many
individuals & companies from all walks of life, that think nothing of the
value of software products.  They don't even think twice before stealing 
software for anything from anyone.  The roll over & die or scream & whine 
like a stuck pig when they hear the price of software products.  It seems
the more something costs the more willing they are to steal it.
    The real problem compounds from here.  If I make a good software product,
and intend to charge a reasonable price for it, so that I can provide support
etc.  I have to have every system that runs it, pay for it.  If I have
stolen software, I have to charge more to every honest person to pay for
the stolen copies.
   I am not saying that you are a crook, the I recognize the fact that many 
many many people are.  I see system after system that the people are kinda
stuck at old system versions because all the software they have is stolen.
(& the new systems have license managers)  These same people are the ones that
are always calling me with stupid questions that would, could, & should be
answered quite quickly just by cracking the stupid manual.  Since the software
is stolen of course the manuals don't exist.
   While I dislike some of the features of the current generation of dec 
license managers, it does accomplish it's job fairly well.  I have spent less
than an hour total in over a year using it.  This is on a academic system that
has had several generations of temp paks, variance paks, & permament paks for
many different software products from several different vendors.  At the
user level, all they do, is run their stupid bits of code (to repeat your
french).  When the license manager keeps you from running your stupid bits of
code, either it's a very temporary situation (my experiences are that dec is
very helpful with pak #'s via phone as are all better vendors), or your system
manager needs replacing, else you are trying to steal software.  If you have
problem a. a little patience is all that's required, if it problem b. you have
a employee problem & shouldn't blame your software vendor, if it's problem c.
I have no pity at all for crooks.
   I for one applaud DEC and all other software vendors that provide trouble
free theft protection for their products.  In my experience, dec's license 
manager does just that.  This is akin to copy protection, companies that used
schemes that worked well (that didn't require constant stupid key disks or
limit the number or backups etc.) survived that holocaust well.
al