Just another reason..
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| techiem2 Jan 09, 2010 5:46 PM EDT |
to use FOSS whenever possible. :)Quoting: Organisations are being put under increasing pressure from software licence audits, with some vendors exploiting technicalities and loopholes in order to meet revenue targets, according to a report by research firm Forrester. Quoting: Microsoft has been criticised for making its licence terms deliberately complex, and in 2009, Steve Ballmer admitted that the Windows licence includes deliberate "gotchas" designed to increase revenue. |
| jezuch Jan 10, 2010 7:30 AM EDT |
And there's this:Quoting:He went on to advise organisations to spend some time “really having a look at what the deal is and what you're buying and what you can use it for,” before signing off on the contract. He's going to kill those poor software verdors, or what? If customers read all those contracts and licenses they would run away screaming! Since they don't it's obvious that they don't know what they agree to. Quoting:“The software industry generally is pretty fair, but obviously it's a commercial operation, and they're going to do the best they can to protect their revenue,” he added. "Best they can do" is in direct conflict with "fair", as we can see. |
| theBeez Jan 10, 2010 9:55 AM EDT |
A license administration is pretty complex in a large organization, something that close software vendors know and let deliberately exist. There is hardly any tooling that lets you count the number of licenses, because the legal conditions are complex and the current "rich client" architectures makes the situation even MORE complex. The only way to do it is to devise a Counting And Transformation Standard, which describes the method of counting (a) users, (b) installations or (c) usage and transform it into the number of licenses used. The best way to do that (if you're a large corporation) is to devise it BEFORE the contract is signed and embed it as an Addendum to the contract itself. Then you can utilize tooling to collect the counts and transform it into the number of licenses. Note this requires quite some organization and takes some resources to apply properly. But if you're a large company, you don't want to be bothered by BSA teams or software auditors running around and requiring resources you don't want to allocate that way at that particular time - or even a fine. But.. the bare truth is that MOST companies have not a clue how many licenses are used. An easy prey for those BSA gangsters. Yes, use FOSS where ever possible ;-) |
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