Dear Software Vendors October 2, 2008
Posted by Kurt in : Computers , trackbackPlease do not make it hard for me to make your software available to my faculty and students.
As awful as I find the whole flexlm license server thing to be, it is much better than other methods. Dongles are bad for client systems. In a university, you are just asking for the helpful little bit to be stolen. And if some idiot suggests I glue the dongle in, then your software will just never make it onto my systems.
What brings this on? This quarter, faculty requested getting some new software on the lab image. No problem, I think. It installed fine. However, the licensing is butt stupid. It is MAC address locked. I know it is considered clever, but it’s not. MAC addresses really aren’t immutable. And what it really means, is that my normal proces of cloning machines doesn’t work for this software. So I can clone it in a non-functional state. But to make it work, I have to gather MAC addresses for 80-something lab machines (and no, not enough licenses for all of our machines anyway), and get 80-something licenses issued. I then have to wrangle 80-something licenses onto each machine individually (And that’s assuming when I get these licenses issued, I don’t have to do them one at a time, which I am afraid I will have to do so, instead of some sort of sane thing where I can paste them all in at once).
Seriously, system administrators work hard, and are the key to getting your software out to the users. ESPECIALLY in an academic environment. Why would you make it hard for me? Because someone might steal it? I’m sorry. I know you think your software is super-special in the area it addresses, but really, I don’t think that my students will bother stealing it. And honestly, if they did somehow, the students in my department are software engineers, going to all sorts of influential companies. Oh no! One lost sale! Except our graduates are more likely to get your software used in the real world. So, to keep a student from having the software (who was *not* going to shell out money on your tool, let’s be honest), you’ve sacrificed many potential sales at their big future employer. Good job.
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