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Reader Voices: Re-licensing Fees
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By Ed Foster, Section The Gripelog
Posted on Wed Oct 08, 2003 at 10:48:40 AM PDT
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Not surprisingly, many readers expressed a great deal of anger and frustration over the software re-licensing policies of Cisco, NetApp, and other manufacturers I detailed in my recent InfoWorld article. The manufacturers' demand that buyers of used equipment pay them again for the operating system or other proprietary software seems unfair to many.
"When used hardware is sold, the software that must be used to operate that hardware should be considered part of the hardware," wrote one reader. "It's a scam to extract another license fee from a subsequent owner. This is nothing more than a greed-driven policy. If the used hardware has been depreciated, as reflected in its price, then shouldn't the software also be depreciated? If the software is considered not to depreciate, as the vendor surely would claim, then why doesn't the software vendor refund the original cost of the software license to the original hardware owner and resell the license to the subsequent hardware owner?"
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Although most victims of these policies have been buyers of the used equipment, I've also now heard from several who ran afoul of Cisco in particular when trying to sell. "We had an ISDN router that we had purchased new for one of our operations," wrote one such reader. "When we no longer required the router, we decided to sell it. However, before making the final decision to part with it, we thought we'd better check with Cisco to determine the obstructions we would encounter in consummating the sale. Guess what? We discovered to our chagrin that it would end up costing our buyer more to buy our used unit (3 1/2 years old) than it would to purchase a new unit. What did we do? We put the thing in a closet where it sits, unused by anyone, and Cisco didn't get one red cent."
Readers had many suggestions for getting around these policies, and at least a few seem to be perfectly legal. "We've found we can buy a large router chassis from Cisco, say a 7206VXR - and get maintenance on it at time of purchase," wrote one reader. "We can then populate it with secondary market cards. Cisco doesn't qualify warranty on MOST chassis type equipment beyond the chassis itself. In other words the line cards are not detailed in maintenance contract, but are covered." |
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