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Reader Voices: Rights Deactivation | 80 comments (80 topical) | Post A Comment
Not quite the same[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#3)
by Anonymous User on Tue Nov 15, 2005 at 11:15:44 AM PDT

The vehicle laws you're referring to affect your right to operate that car in that state - they don't affect your ownership of the car or your right to use it otherwise.  So you tint your windows too dark - you still own the car, you can still break it down to parts, you can sell the parts or the whole car, you can further modify it, you can start it up, you can even operate it on the roads - though you risk a fine in doing so.  It's still your property.  If you lose a wheel, you can put another on and it's still your property.

That's quite different from the Windows case where, if you are unable to use the same motherboard, your rights to the software cease entirely.  You effectively do not own it anymore (if, as "licensing" would have it, you ever did at all.)  Notice that we're not talking about *modifying* Windows at all.  We're talking about using it, as is, as Microsoft built it, on a different computer.  It seems to me the two are entirely independent entities (Microsoft didn't make the motherboard and vice-versa), but apparently the vendors disagree.

This is just part of the continuing effort of software vendors to manipulate the terms of sale to their greater benefit.  It has been going on for years.  Though I don't expect it to happen, I'd like to see a return to the time when software was licensed to the user (or number of users) rather than to the hardware - particularly now that dual- and multi-core machines are coming out.  Vendors are gearing up to charge multiples of the base price for one license to the software that runs once on a computer - just because it happens to have multiple cores in it.  The program still runs only one copy, and has the same number of users as it would in a single-core machine, it just runs faster.  So why should we pay more for the same software on different computers?


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Higher cost software on more capable machines[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#6)
by Anonymous User on Tue Nov 15, 2005 at 11:50:06 AM PDT

The program still runs only one copy, and has the same number of users as it would in a single-core machine, it just runs faster. So why should we pay more for the same software on different computers?

This practice has been going on for years with software such as MVS, CICS, & Oracle written (mostly) for enterprise class servers. The more processing power there is, the more you pay - even though only one copy of the software may be running on any given box. And, if you change your box during the license period, you better believe you can't just transfer the license over - you have to start all over again, although maybe with some proration from the old license.

Nevertheless, I do not think the discussed offense by MS and eMachines is equivalent - for small server and desktop machines this practice is ludicrous.


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Higher Cost[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#10)
by Anonymous User on Tue Nov 15, 2005 at 12:10:25 PM PDT

You're right - this doesn't apply to the Microsoft and eMachines case. I was going off on a bit of a tangent there, sorry about that. It's only similar as far as "vendors manipulating the terms of sale."

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yes[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#77)
by maderikapapa on Fri Jun 27, 2008 at 10:18:53 PM PDT

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Not precisely[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#18)
by Anonymous User on Tue Nov 15, 2005 at 02:16:47 PM PDT

Mainframe software is indeed frequently licensed by machine capacity, but that's based on the assumption that a larger machine can and will service more users. And if you do change the machine, you sure can transfer the license -- any mainframe vendor who didn't allow that would be out of business pretty quickly (even CA). Now, if you *upgrade* the machine, you sure may have to pay for the difference between the old license "size" and the new one, but that's a different matter.

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Consumers would never go for that...[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#12)
by Anonymous User on Tue Nov 15, 2005 at 12:17:54 PM PDT

Such dual & multi-core pricing won't last long. Micro$$$oft was at least "right" in treating a multi-core PC as one machine as that's the direction that "standard" computers are headed. Imagine if Doom 3 cost twice as much for a dual-core version, or if M$ charged twice as much for dual-core version of Office because WordArt and Access ran "that much better". People would leave in droves.

Oracle's pricing model will change soon, especially once single-core processors are no longer available. Quad- and even 8-core CPUs are no longer fantasy, both on the server & client side. That means that as the number of CPU cores increases exponentially to infinity, Oracle's price will do the same, while SQL Server will remain constant... I can't see such pricing models being more than temporary.

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