Timothy - Excellent points, and no one wants to hear us debate this ad nauseam. A few thoughts:
- I'm not a z/OS.e expert. My point was that if you say it's z/OS.e, then illegal products flat refuse to run. It's like a key in that way. - I can see a real problem getting people to send us a report. Sounds stupid, but getting anything out of a customer can be a problem, unless you have real power of some sort (which IBM does). Heck, it can be a chore getting a SYSOUT from a customer even when they are reporting a problem. I'm serious. "This is a critical problem, it's killing us, you have to fix it right away." "What was the exact message?" "Oh something about an error -- we already purged the SYSOUT." - Charging by some business metric is the correct answer, except that it won't work! Seriously, I agree with you that it would be the right way to charge. I heard Scott McNealy talk one time about charging by corporate headcount: pay us $50 (?) per month per body and you can have all of the Sun software you want. It won't work for a small vendor. You can't change the dominant paradigm. It's hard or impossible if you're big; it's certainly impossible if you're small. If everyone is used to paying for software by the MSU, they may bitch about it, but they want to pay some other way even less. Often the "right" metric is some sort of business volume. For my file transfer product, I wished we could charge by the kilobyte. The problem is, any kind of "metering file" is as fraught with "trust" problems as a license key file. You have to be authorized to cut SMF records -- is that right? Requiring authorization is a sales obstacle. - Sure, every software company would rather have sales reps than distributors. Most small software companies are capital and management-attention constrained. Overseas offices are VERY capital and management-attention intensive. It's great to "require" the customers to contact you, but if the distributor fails to mention that fact, you're right back where you were. They have the customer's ear and speak his language; you don't. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Timothy Sipples Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 5:27 PM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Re: License keys for ISV products(What alternatives are there?) Charles Mills writes: >Hasn't even IBM gone to >less and less of a "trust" model? Are not the restrictions on z/OS.e, for >example, enforced by technology that is somewhat analogous to keys? Re: z/OS.e, I'd say not. A customer has control over IEASYSxx, subject (legally) to their license. ("LICENSE=z/OSe" isn't a secret code that only IBM can issue. :-)) Besides, the last release of z/OS.e is 1.8. Starting with z/OS 1.9 there are different, still non-key, licensing rules (i.e. zNALC). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
