I’m sympathetic to a vendor's need for keys. A (long gone) shop I worked in suffered the grab-and-run of a well-known product from its licensed location to an unlicensed one. Thanks to a rogue operator who I guess wanted to make his day to day job a little easier and figured out how to do a copy over NJE. ISV threw a fit, wanted an extraordinary penalty. Not from the miscreant himself of course.
We now deal with many ISVs. Most of the big ones plus some dogies as well. We do frequent DR tests as we own the DR environment. I'm not aware that our keys in general include the DR machine, but everything works. Warnings are fine; I personally appreciate the reminder that I'm running a DR system, which otherwise looks exactly like production. Our biggest concern is getting renewal keys in time to keep a product from imploding. That issue is seldom the fault of the ISV. Can you spell bean counter? . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile 626-543-6132 Office ⇐=== NEW robin...@sce.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Savor, Thomas (Alpharetta) Sent: Monday, March 05, 2018 2:23 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: (External):Re: Product license key program That's the problem. If you give customer Source code, they can get around the key. The only thing I could think of, was to only deliver object to certain Batch and Online modules that never change. Sort of Black Box those modules. On the contract thing....well in our case at the time, it was a software sell and a bunch of mods we did for this Turkish Bank. They owed us around 1 million dollars...then they decided not to pay at all...all support for them ended. The problem was that it was a State Owned Bank....so we had to eat it. It was a hard lesson to learn. But even the keys, it was fascinating to see these keys. I've tried to understand how in the World these worked....i've seen a zap before to extended a product from now to next year....now the zap looked like a couple of LA's applied to a module...and the product extended to next year. But you don’t find ANY dates in this program, so how this is done has always been "Magic". Thanks, Tom Savor -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Grinsell, Don Sent: Monday, March 05, 2018 4:23 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Product license key program Tom, I guess it all depends on your contract terms. If the software requires a key to run, then you should be able to get paid for delivering an updated key. If you are delivering source code, well any competent programmer could probably circumvent your key logic and be prepared to face the consequences if you choose to audit them. On the other hand, if the license key is for support, then they have rights to use the software as delivered, but upgrades or help would require an active subscription easily verified on your end. Regards, Don -- Donald Grinsell, Systems Programmer Enterprise Technology Services Bureau SITSD/Montana Department of Administration 406.444.2983 (D) "It was as true as taxes is. And nothing's truer than them." ~ Charles Dickens (1812-70) > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On > Behalf Of Savor, Thomas (Alpharetta) > Sent: Monday, March 05, 2018 2:01 PM > To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU > Subject: Re: Product license key program > > > Back to the keys question, I've tried to figure out how to even have > keys in the application system. > Places that I've worked at, there have been times when getting paid > for our software or services has been difficult to collect, so what about > keys ?? > Well, that becomes a challenge when we have always delivered the code > to the customer...not really sure how to do that. > > Thanks, > > Tom Savor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
