On 10/18/2017 9:46 AM, Jesse 1 Robinson wrote:
I've been in this business for decades and have never once observed a deliberate conspiracy to cheat a vendor. Frequent ads about 'piracy' conjure up boardrooms full of Captain Hooks comparing the size of their parrots while they chart cheating schemes. It doesn't happen.
It HAS happened! I am aware of one case in particular in which a foreign distributor sold PSI software to numerous "off book" customers he never told us about. It wasn't until we received a technical support query that the scheme was finally uncovered! What a lose-lose mess that turned out to be. Those customers had paid in good faith and yet we never received a dime.
OTOH I've become aware of a few unauthorized or inadvertent violations. One involved a cowboy operator who copied an ISV product to an environment for which it was not licensed. He thought he had found a better way to do his job. Nasty fallout. Another case concerned PSF, where the contract specified a certain volume of AFP print--not CPU MSUs. No one noticed that the limit had been exceeded until a routine IBM audit revealed the excession. The piper was paid.
It's not unusual for users/operators/admins to be unaware of specific T&Cs specified in software contracts. In the old days, customers would license software everywhere so compliance was trivial. (Just pay the bill.) But, in today's price-conscious, cost-cutting world, it's not unusual for customers to license software to a bare-minimum, limited subset of execution environments. As a result, accidental violations of software contracts are on the rise. This had led to direct customer requirements to have software *block* users/operators/admins from accidentally violating T&Cs agreed to by the corporation. FWIW, the support we provided to enforce this has been well received...
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