[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011, Simon Waters wrote:
On 15/12/11 07:49, Gordon Henderson wrote:What I find irritating is the insistence on people using Red Hat and the insistence of software venduh's only supporting Red Hat. I recently had to install FlexLM on a Debian server... Didn't work as RH are now dicking about with basic libraries making them non portable without some fiddling (linking ld-lsb to ld-linux)Evils of proprietary software. If it were free it would probably be in Debian already. FlexLM always sucked, but then licensing software is by definition an anti-feature so it is bound to suck. It works - you can only use the software for the number of seats you paid for. It doesn't work - you can't use the software you've paid for. The Met Office had this pain, of course you paid per section, or per project, but it was sensible to share licences as widely as you could (as not every piece is in use every second of the day, projects don't last for ever), meaning of course you might run out of licenses on the projects that paid for it. Of course the software was designed to support the vendors licensing needs not the end users. HP did their own licensing software at one point based on DCE, it was so painful they eventually just waived licensing for the software that had previously used it for us, even at a list price of several thousand per seat. The secret is not to use proprietary software, then there is no licensing software, and no risk of exceeding license agreements that are enforced by other means.
Whilst I agree with everything here, sadly, not all software is available in a non-proprietary format - and worse, even if there are non-proprietary alternatives, there is still a huge percentage of managers/developers who simply won't believe that non-proprietary can be good.
One of the worst places I've found this is in the telephony area. Because offices have been used to paying through their noses for PBXs with every feature licensed and accounted for (on a monthly/quarterly basis), when presented with a solution that costs in-total what they pay per quarter as part of their 7-year contract with the telco they simply don't believe you. Or (worse) they're embarrassed to admit that a cheaper solution exists, so discount it without a 2nd thought.
Come the revolution... Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq