PC owners - the largest punk gang ever?
The year is 1981. IBM has just released the Personal Computer; a double-bass cost gas pedal it hopes will create a success brand. Several models are produced em speedy succession accompanied by an promotional material campaign featuring a Charlie Film maker figure. The message is clear away: It?s tuppeny and it?s cheerful.
The growth vector for the product turns out to be a software application called a spreadsheet. Its many early forms - VisiCalc, Multiplan, Lotus 1-2-3, along with WordStar word-processing and of course games all instrument drive hardware sales.
Nobody seems to question the rapid and promiscuous spread of these programs by copying onto 5.25? floppy disks and passing them from person to person.
That was then. This is immediate. Harsh fines and jail sentences are threatened to anyone involved in doing what came naturally back gary the early ?80s. It?s a Very Bad Thing to mimeo software without having a license to bob so. They retroflex ?this stuff is ours, we want to be paid for it?, and of course they?re right.
But here is a problem. Software?s binary information is a kind of digital DNA, unremitting wanting to replicate. It?s what has made and sustained the linear revolution. When transmitting information, whether from one disk to another or over the Internet, errors can be corrected, faint signals regenerated as new, and even lost portions of messages recreated. This is the essence of the digital world, and copy is its big trick.
One of the things most of us did with our first computer was to copy something. In our early PC artistic creation Recopy was the most popular word. Doing it was so easy and so immediately rewarding. It did nobody any harm ? did it? The user got the software and the manufacturer got their product widely distributed.
But a company has to make pile, not just gain market share, and at some foreshadow in time a shift occurred. It?s as if the manufacturers decided to play the soccer off-side rule and grab the high moral ground at the same time - nearly every PC owner in the world was suddenly wrong-footed. And no one after all can disagree with their position. But how will they play catch-up on their lost revenues? How can they now make all their customers compliant?
A London analyst who
specialises in exponent rights issues says "the paradigm we have at present where the fishing license chases the product doesn't seem to be an effective mechanism for compliance by itself."
In other words trying to push a license into everywhere the software has gone without the ease with which the software got there in the first place will prove difficult. But that?s not all.
An account manager for a hardware firm in the US says "It can be difficult to keep the licensing nailed down. The hardware changes, the software moves on, departments, even companies, merge. The picture is always changing"
Demand has always fuelled innovation in Information Technology. Fluid, dynamic, competitive, the weather condition of IT constantly move. Suppliers apply various strategies at different times for different reasons: Market share, publication shipments, profit. Licensing is a big weapon inch their arsenal. Then new technologies emerge, legislation changes, big players go bust and others are created. It?s nasty to see how a static and legalistic document can cover all this.
There are also the licensing arrangements that software manufacturers employ. Licenses empire day be priced according to whether they are academic, charity, large displacement unit, product upgrade, competitive upgrade, client server, thin-client, or one of several other types. On top of that there are the popular service add-ons of maintenance and technical sponsor.
Of course if we all started afresh that would make things easier. But as that?s out we must do two things; look chemical element new software in terms of correct quantity and correct type of license. That?s the easy part. The not intensifier easy part is to look at what your company already has and see what licenses, if any, are missing or incorrect.
?The biggest criminal gangster us history? is about to be disbanded.
©2003 Jamie Plenderleith
Microsoft Certified Licensing Specialist
Chief Developer - Whaddayagot Pro Asset Management Suite
Jamie is a software design engineer with Everyman Technologies of Dublin Ireland. He attends Trinity College Dublin part time and is a Sci-Fi fan.
jamie@everyman.ie
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