> On Oct 18, 2017, at 2:31 AM, Parwez Hamid <[email protected]> wrote: > > My 2 cents worth. > > If you are fairly new to the MF world, you might find the concept of 'trust' > a bit strange :-) At the risk of opening up a whole different discussion, > having worked in the MF world for a very long time, my observations are that > apart from a few 'rouge' vendors (I think most of this community know what I > mean by this), majority did business on 'trust' basis. Many years ago, > companies like IBM used to take a customers view. In a multi-CPC environment, > if a customer stated that they used a certain product on X number of CPCs, > that's what they were charged for. However some did 'break' the 'trust' and > software audits told a different story. While some vendors may still be doing > business on 'trust' basis others have taken steps to 'manage and audit' use > of their software products by embedding checks in the product requiring > 'keys' or expiry dates etc etc. > For the most part I agree with you. There were quite a few vendors who took the meaning to a whole new level when they started putting in requirements for having the CPU serial numbers, either in their own table or in a member of a PDS. Instead of if there was an issue throwing out a message on the console to just stop working. In 40+ years of the sysproging I only found one that cheated. To top it off it was a $40 a month utility. The rest of them kept it strictly legit. One bad software product refused to work because of either a miscommunication or whatever the product refused to work. Unfortunetly, because of the “miscommunication” a system had to be de-installed and the other had to be re-installed. This cost the company at least $75,000 and a lot of aggravated people that had to come back in a week later and dei-install and re-install, over a $75 a month product that was deemed needed. Needless to say from then on any contract we signed had a provision of someone on call 24 hours at the vendor or a weeks time and the software kept running. Every vendor took the weeks option. The one company that violated the good conduct law, may or may not have been simple test that went into production without test and nobody realized that the product should have been deleted. Myself I think they were trying to cheat the company. I can’t remember how many nights I had to come in because of a system install to make sure the cpu serial numbers were OK. Only once in my 40+ years it got screwed up. The new IBM reporting system seems to me fair but I suspect other companies will not go along as the process on their end gets complicated. The side issue is that companies will probably keep the old methodology around for a fair amount of time. Now, I don’t know how the new system works internally about registering usage, but I expect that companies will use this as an excuse to raise prices because of the reporting issue on their end. On the other side, not sure how a vendor is going to handle multiple versions of the software on the new way, I guess I will find out the hardware. Ed
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