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What Will Happen to Rented Software When Its Publisher Sinks?
"Currently if you purchase software, and the software company goes under, all you lose is support, you still have a working product. Consider a large corporation making a major rollout of "rented" (rented meaning any software with a time-limited key) software. If the software company closes its doors, the corporation has now invested thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars into rolling something out that may only work for the rest of the quarter.
On the other hand, consider that you are a company that rents software. If you are required to enable non-terminating keys for the event of corporate liquidation, this would only have to be broken once and one single non-terminating key could get out on the net, thus defeating one of the largest concepts behind "rented" software, anti-piracy (not that I don't whole-heartedly believe that any good software with a rented key won't be cracked with a key patch or something).
Certainly it seems a viable solution to require such companies to give or sell their key distribution duties to another company."
"Well, I guess that's your problem, not ours"
- CEO, every software company that ever existed.
Just hire an 1337 h4x0r to crack the key system.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Guess you have to find another company to rent from. Bigger question is what if you have apps that rely on the rented software?
So lets say a company that rents software goes under...And they are required to give the keys to another company so you can keep running your software. What if no company will take the offer? If the business failed in the first place, it may just be that there is no money in the software...So whos gonna want to take on a losing product?
If no other company will touch the software, are you then just S.O.L?
That's a very good point. But the only problem with using non-terminating keys is that someone eventually finds them, publishes them on the Internet and the whole pirating software thing continues (with nullifies the reason for using the renting system).
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Demand freely redistributable software with
source code.
If you (or your company) are comfortable with the risks of renting software, then rent software. If you're not, don't.
Nobody is going to force you to rent software. If you want to pay the (arguably) extra money, then go buy some non-terminating software. Even if every piece of software in existence is rental-based, nobody will force you to use it.
Just don't accept a license you don't want to agree to.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
I would guess that before going under the publisher would arrange to sell the lucrative subscription rights to another publisher. So your subscription fees would be transfered to the new publisher.
Given a reasonably level playing field, who would win a fight between a bear and a shark?
If that company goes out of business and your contract is renewable, you cannot renegotiate with an entity that does not exist, therefore you cannot renegotiate. Your contract does NOT state that both parties will be there at the end of the term, I'd bet.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Your best bet is to buy, not rent. And if a company will only rent to you, start one that sells what they're renting. You'll have a market. (On /. at least.)
--
if the company from which you are renting your software goes under, you would become the owner of the software. Obviously, this would have to be covered in the lease agreement, but any good legal team should be demanding such clauses. In my company, for example, we have a clause in all contracts with various vendors that if they fail to meet their contractual obligations we obtain full rights to the source code. Which it then becomes my job to support and implement upgrades to. ;-)
Presumably the subscription will continue to be source of assets that somone will be interested in. As long as support costs a company less than they make in renewal fees somone will have an interest in collecting money... After there are too few people renewing to justify the cost of customer service, I would think that benevolent companies would make a "eternal key" public domain, but that's not to say that they would.
This reminds me of the drivers for my hayes modem. They disappeared for a while and now have come back since the rights were finally purchased by a company that cares... Of course, there is no advantage to the company offering the drivers now. It's kind of like legacy hardware support except that the money will keep coming in. It wouldn't surprise me if companies could be started merely to sell renewals for extinct companies.
+++ ATH0 +++
...you'll have to swith back to MS.
Unless THEY are the ones to go under.... While it is unlikely, it would be an interesting happenstance...
Boss: Install Windows on those 20 new Laptops for the boys in sales.
IT Dept: Uh, boss? The authentication server at Microsoft is not responding...
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Having a key posted to the net is only a problem is the key is general and not location specific. How hard would it be for a company to sell a key to a corporation that only works on a given TCP/IP range or domain name? For the single user it could be bound to one of a number of hardware specific identifiers. This is the only way the Anti-piracy system would work. However even that is flawed. There are a lot of shareware registration systems that work in a similar way. However most of them have been circumvented by someone reveres engineering the key generator. This is frequently no small feet but once done is a source of unlimited keys. Bottom line is that there is no way to stop piracy, you can only make it harder. This in turn makes the lives of honest users more difficult as we too have to deal with the effects of anti-piracy features. A good example of this is products such as 3D-Studio. I own a legit copy but use a crack so I don't have to mess around with the hardware lock (it uses a parallel port dongel). In my own shareware (shameless plug) Net Weasel (Search on cnet or zdnet. Download it, I need the hits) I use a non-hardware specific encryption system that could be easy negated if someone where to build a key generator.
Insightful article, and a great discussion piece. Sadly, as human nature will have it, we will probably do nothing until it actually happens, and we get bit HARD by it. California energy crisis, gasoline shortage panic, ozone depletion, rainforest depletion, shortage of fossil fuel, Y2k panic in 1999, etc... I'm no environmental freak -- just saying that like those issues, folks are not likely to try to fix the problem until it actually happens.
... with Shareware BBS software... his door program's creator couldn't be found, and the door software was reporting that the SysOP was committing piracy, for the door had been unregistered for eight years... The problem was quickly solved when the 386's hard disk failed last year, losing the BBS software, a 5 year old TradeWars 2002 game, and lots of fidonet mail. So much for being the last BBS just about in this area...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Either like games which the publisher stops requiring CDs/CD Keys/Internet authentication and releases a patch to disable it or it will stop working since all you did is buy a time-limited license and you can't buy that license anymore.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Which, btw reminds me. If you want to combat .NET, there needs to be a OSS initive at starts using Mozilla services to write applications, all GPLed, which finally would let Linux companies make a profit by selling diskspace in a program similiar to Apples iDisk.
Burn Hollywood Burn
If they go out of business that's your tough luck. Rent software from someone else. If car rental company went out of business would they be required let me keep the car I rented?
"What Will Happen to Rented Software When Its Publisher Sinks?" Dunno. And who cares? If people and companies are dumb enough to pay to be screwed like this, why should it be an issue when the inevitable happens? OK, with today's commercial software, when a software house sinks, the license to the software is usually snapped up by another company. A captive user market can be quite an asset. I presume this will continue to be the case. But smart people should be using free software anyway, so it's a moot point.
I've got Word Perfect 5.1 for Unix and VSIFax 2.0, both multiuser, text-based, binary software running on AIX. I was amazed when they lived past the year 2000. As far as I'm concerned, they can stay as long as people still use them or they die.
What will really suck is if your ASP that hosts your apps on their server dies. Then you're kinda screwed.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Moreover, do you as an end user want to be subject to the shenanigans that will inevitably take place when a company goes under? Keep in mind that Software Rental 'R Us has your address, email, name, etc. etc. If Software Rental 'R Us goes out of business and they have a database of, oh, a million active emails, Direct Marketers 'R Us might just want to take a look at purchasing the keys.
There's a better solution: don't do it. If Microsoft comes along with Office 2005 (now with polka-dot highlighting!) with a rental license and 2 Fortune 500 companies purchase it (everyone else stays with Office 2004), how long do you think rental software licenses will last at MS? If people make informed decisions as end users (or, more saliently, IT Directors), this problem may still be avoidable.
Let's hope so.
-db
The black-helicopters-are-spying-on-me/lower-my-taxes/ there's-a-Waco-coverup/they-want-to-take-my-guns-a way crowd will disagree, but we need government legislation that makes software a product just like anything else that we buy in a store. Then Microsoft would quit trying to find ways to embed javascript into e-mail and, instead, make Outlook reliable and secure.
We aren't talking about upgrades and shit. I know people who just upgraded from word perfect 5.1 - develop a strong product, you won't have to issue upgrades. If it works - it works.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I work for a small company that has had to think about these issues, not because we rent software, but because we lock our software using host ID's, which are generated from BIOS ID's, hard drive ID's, etc.
One option that we've just started looking at is the idea of having the software licensing system (not the source code itself) held in escrow. I'm not sure what the ramifications are, but maybe it's worth a look.Just keep it simple.
I think that software rental is pretty much a pipe dream anyway. Anyone who has managed large (5,000+ workstation) networks knows that it is simply impossable to manage that many desktops effectivly. When things start breaking because of no support available, or when IT budgets get so far out of hand because of the people required, rented software will find a niche in smaller, easier to manage workplaces. When that happens, profit margins for the software renter's will fall, and it will just fade away.
On the other hand, it is such a lovely looking possibility for continued revinue stream, no doubt there just won't be any other choice.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
You are obviously posting into the wrong forum. I'm sure most Slashdot readers don't give a f*ck about this 'problem'.
Obviously you have identified a huge problem area with this key-leasing scam. Then don't go for it.
When designing defense electronics, there was allways this nagging about having a second source for as much components as possible. This was to achieve project safety for long term project.
I'm sure the software using industries would benefit from this kind of thinking. Long term project safety and how to get that in the software world.
Opensource makes it so easy since I can hire some college kid to do some editing and recompilation if necessary. If it's more complex, I might have to hire a consultant to fix the problems.
With Opensource I'm in full control all the time. No ugly surprises anymore.
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
What happens if the company who rents me my apartment goes under? Do I lose my place to live? Do I now own my apartment? Do you see how ridiculous these questions are?
So don't buy it.
sulli
RTFJ.
So when software rental company "X" says they will no longer support / rent product "Y" and I have to eventually reinstall the old "Y" due to crash / hardware upgrade etc. and they can't / won't supply me with a key for "Y" any longer??
I think the sofware "rental" is one of the stupidist flim-flam jobs to come down the pike. Linux just keeps looking better and better - due in part to MS and their cohorts extorting the customer with their practices.
Go ahead MS - self distruct - rent away. Drive up the cost of support through the roof from ignorant users constantly hosing their products and calling in or choking the web servers every other day trying to get new keys. Drive off the corporate customer who just won't stand for it. Make yourself a target for a new breed of virii that screws up your registration key. Image a widespread worm that wipes your precious key out and MS being inundated with millions of phone calls from pissed off customers. I think MS and other companies getting into the "rental" business are setting themselves up for a real big fall.
I'd probably buy a pencil from Bill Gates on a street corner just for "old times sake" :)
What would have happened if the California power companies had said: "Well damn if we aren't out of money. Oh well, turn it off." In other words, the customers are screwed. Oh, I suppose the companies could charge the customers to get their files sent to them on CD so that the customers could upload them to whoever they sign up with next, but that is darn inconvienient.
No, I'll continue to store my files on my own storage devices, thank you very much.
Ciao.
nahtanoj
The point to this story is that renting something is only a temporary agreement.
If I own software, and the product is discontinued, I can still use the product. But I won't be getting much support or many updates.
If I rent software I must not assume that I will continue to be able to use it after the terms of the contract..
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
I bought a piece of software called Bodycraft, which is supposed to generate a workout and eating plan appropriate to your wants/needs (e.g. gain muscle, lose weight, stay same weight)
I bought it, and installed it on a computer, and called for the code to unlock the stupid software dongle, and everything went relatively well: although the program was buggy, I could hack it to work.
Moved to a different computer some time later - whoops! Need to re-register. The phone was disconnected when I tried to call back for a re-registration (some stupid software dongle).
Contacted the big name fitness guru who's name is all over the box - who said "I can't help you, that's the company, they screwed me too, yadda yadda yadda - but you know what, with this new company I'm working with, you can buy the same program AGAIN for $30 more!"
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
...hashed out by all the different vendors, and you would pick one. In reality however, I'd say embed an 'immortal' key, then when they go belly up, give out the key, free, or allow another to license/lease it.
There are alot of gaming companies that do things like this, TSR sold to WoC, WoC sold to Hasbro...We still can play Monopoly(tm). What needs to happen is better control on the developers side, so they won't lose out to crackers, etc., and take risks.
Then you have service providers that leave you out to dry, ie Ameritech buys out competitor, then you get their bill in the mail saying you didn't pay for the service that was previously free. Tough tacos amigo!
I think there needs to be less schitzo in all laws in general about aquisition, saying if you aquire it, you need to have the same level of responsibility to customers[gets off soap box...]
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
To speculate on "one thing" happening when subscription-based software companies go under is inaccurate. Public reactions to events change over time.
What is critical is how the public reacts to subscription-based software and how people react to the first time a subscription service goes under in a very public way. That will set the stage for how people react in the future - and if people will maintain the subscription model.
It is my hope that people are made aware of the dangers of subscription software - and that the first time a subscription service goes under (and one will) people raise merry hell about it. Then we will see precautions, then we will see harsh and serious reactions.
But if this is not done, this will become "just another computer problem" people put up with. It will become like blue screens and failing dot-coms.
What happens when subscription services go under? That depends on what WE are willing to make happen.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I used to work for a medical lab software company. While we didn't rent our software to labs, we did charge support and maintenance, which included free upgrades, etc. As part of each contract, we notified the client that the source code was placed in escrow: in the event that we went under, all clients got free access to the source so that they could maintain it, or hire others to maintain / enhance, etc.
...) you have the clout to insist on this from the software firm.
Seems like the same deal might work for rentals, *IF* (and I know it's a big if
A safer solution for your company (regular Joe's probably don't have enough leverage for this) is to ask the software vendor to put their source code into escrow in return for your business. That way, if the company folds you automatically get the source code.
Ideally, they should have clauses in the contact for backup, in case they're unable to get a non-terminating key before the subscription expires.
Personally, if I had no choice about some sort of anti-piracy system (that is one thing I would NEVER advise any of my clients doing) I'd rather have a dongle hanging out of each of my client's machines COM ports. It's ugly, and supposedly expensive, but producing a hundred thousand of them has got to be cheaper than maintaining a subscriber database and the hassle of dealing with customers when the inevitable something goes wrong. Ideally, the software companies are going to realize that not all of us are VV4r3z pir8z.
--- Chief and Sole Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
If Hertz went out of business while I'm on my next trip, do you think they'd let me keep the rental car? Hell, no!
I use EDA tools at work,which are typically time-licensed (for 100K+ per license) and if one of those companies were to go out of business, you'd be SOL. This doesn't happen too often in the EDA world, however. You're much more likely to have a struggling company bought by another company, and have the users hope against hope that the new company would continue to support old products (especially when all the employees in the acquired company have likely left).
Which leads us to the question you should be asking :
What happens when an old version of rented software works fine for you, but the vendor will only license newer versions that don't fit in your work flow or that would invlove significant cost on your part to perform the upgrade?
At best, the vendor would sell you licenses without support, since they only have the resources to support the newest versions. At worst, they'll tell you that if you don't want to buy the new version, you can suck eggs. And they can do that, since you were only renting the software to begin with.
This arrangement works for EDA tools, where you get significant support from the vendor in exchange for your $$$, but I imagine that when deployed in the software industry at large, it will only serve to screw the consumer even more, and put more money in the vendor's pockets in exchange for doing less.
Is it any wonder that software rentals are the ultimate dream of any software company?
What happens when the company you bought software from now goes under? It's the same thing. In six month you are going to end up with a useless software package. It's not different from the subscription service. Pick up your bits and find another program.
This exact thing happened to me with 3Com's LANSentry RMON software. They build hardware probes that required proprietary software to access them,. The software required an ELM key to operate. When I needed a new ELM key, 3Com said that they sold the company that wrote the software , and the keygenerator along with it and I'd have to purchase new probes and software.
Needless to say, I was astonished! The probes were only a year old!!
My experience indicates that the answer is to the Slashdot question is "not much".
Back in the early days of dvd, existed Divx (not to be confused with divx :-) which was more or less a movie rental in which you paid for the movie and never returned it. However you could update your plan from a say 48 hours to 2 weeks, to unlimited viewing depending on how much you pay. This seems to be similiar to the current software subscription models being set up, in which you pay for probably a time frame, and then pay more for an extension to that. Now, the question is what happens to that software when a company goes out of business and for that, I think we can draw a pretty clear picture from what happened to divx. When divx ended, the first thing they did was offer a $100 rebate (which doesn't really fit into the current issue but i'm geting there). The next thing they did was to NOT ALLOW anyone to lengthen the time frame for watching their movies, yet allowed them to finish off what they currently had paid for. Now for the software subscription method I don't see any reason why this would be different, in that when the company folds do to contract they must honor their customers purchase. When the contract expires they don't renew it. The customer goes and finds some other software to fill their needs and the world moves on. (Personal Note: I'm up for change, but I really don't see any point of this... I mean if you want to move things to the internet then just use credit card and sell software Whole... none of this microsoft release and patch crap)
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Isn't the whole point of a key expiration system to keep the user up to date with the latest versions and prevent piracy?
The mere implementation of allowing a non-expiring key to exist will completely destroy the anti-piracy ability. Someone, somewhere will reverse engineer the code, determine what the non-expiring key is, and then post it to all the warez IRC channels and newsgroups. So much for improved anti-piracy.
I don't forsee software companies willingly implementing a non-expiring key. The example I mentioned above will push many non-programmer types (which normally end up controlling the feature list) to sway away from them. Aside from that obvious problem, what does it say about the intentions of the company? Sure, Microsoft can get away with just about anything, but if Joe's Software Barn writes an application that uses this software rental model, do they put one in, or not? Not putting in a non-expiring key will lead to problems if they ever go under, however putting one in could look as though the company is not sure of itself, which could easily cause many potential customers to steer clear of their product.
This whole rental idea on software is a pretty shakey model IMHO. Yes, it keeps the costs of software down for businesses. However, the repurcussions of totally relying on the survival of the authoring company can be very extreme.
If this model ever really catches on, I will stick to 1 rule. If the company issueing the software is not one of the VERY big few (MS, IBM, Oracle, etc), I will not be renting from them, and would opt to buy instead.
In the consumer space, this has already happened with DIVX (the DVD "rental" scam). DIVX's answer to its customers was, essentially, "Fsck you."
However, there are also several high-end software packages out there -- the old Diab C compiler and Perforce source repository system come to mind -- where you have to install a "license" server and periodically update the key that allows it to continue to operate. Doubtless others exist. How many of these have had their parent companies fold? What did their customers do? Was the eventuality covered in the contract?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Concider an appartment building that suddenly gets a new manager? With the less scrupulous, the first thing they do is raise the rent.
In some places in North America, there is nothing to stop a landlord from raising the rent as high as they want, in order to essentially evict tenents. Of course, there is no way a company would want to evict key holders, but if they already have their infrastructure based on the technology, how fair is it if the new owners raise the rent by several hundred percent?
There are laws in many places that limit how much the rent can be raised in appartments at a time. Perhaps the same should be done for this business as well?
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
The EDA tool industry already rents software on a subscription basis, and from what I have seen, what usually ends up happening is that anyone currently using the product is given a permanent license but no more support. I have seen this with both companies going under and with companies discontinuing their product (usually by "selling" their product to a competitor, but not giving them any of the IP for the product). I have not heard of licenses for these tools getting cracked as this is very specialized software, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. They usually use a licensing system called FlexLM, and it usually uses licenses that are both time limited and node locked (can only exist on/be served from one specific machine with a particular serial number (or in the case of PCs, the Ethernet card's MAC address, as most PCs don't have a serial number)). Either of these limits can be removed (to make non-expiring keys, for example). The only real problem is if the machine on which the key resides dies (or the Ethernet card dies) those "permanent" licenses have effectively expired, as you no longer have a machine to run them on (and you have no one to turn to to get a replacementkey ).
no one!
Its been shown time and time again that if you write a program, and especially if your license agreement is good, you aren't liable. This applies to everything, including radiation therapy machines (with which there have been incidents), and pc software (who's liable if there's a problem with a program you use and you lose everything?).
Basically, there needs to be some kind of legistlation to hold coders/software engineers who SELL a product responsible. ie, a universal clause that goes in every EULA for pay software (ie, freeware/gpl/etc immune) saying that if you payed for the software, the company that makes it is responsible for makeing sure it actually works, or something like that.
As for rentable-apps, well it'd mean that the developer was responsible if it went belly up... I know it seems flawed, but if a car-maker discontinues a car, they're still responsible if there's a design flaw (can you say Pinto?). Make the coders personally liable (ie, not Company XYZ, but the employee who works for the company). Just like a civil engineer who signs his name to a bridge, so too have professional coding standards. As for software keys, the whole idea is flawed. Software keys ALWAYS depend of a mathmatical formula to derive valid keys. If the company can create them, so can someone else. The best solution is that if you're outfitting huge offices with tonnes of rented software, you use hardware keys/dongles/whatever, and put an exiration in the code on the key. Harder to crack, and you can simply release a non-expiring key if your company went belly-up.
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
What happens to the infrastructure of any company that cannot afford it?
.bomb eroded their bank balance, and now the building just sits. There was a newspaper "contest" yesterday, challenging us all to repurpose the existing architecture that was already there. Among the entries: homeless shelter, art museum, paint it trailer - park pink, etc, to hilgight the fact that it really was an unwanted eyesore. My favorite: encase it in three miles, or so, of barbwire (ie use a series of barbwire wrappings to approximate "walls".
Intel had a building going up in Austin, until the
The point is, the company that wanted it, doesn't anymore and it just sits and will deteriorate until someone decides it's cheap enough to buy.
The same thing happened with the VUE boxes that came out in the early 80's (think basic TV + HBO)
Sure, they tried to reclaim the boxes, but didn't have the means to do so and since there's no programming left for those particular set - top boxes, they collect dust. There is a price point there - I'd buy one for $0.50, just to throw on a shelf and not look at it. Maybe I could tweak it sufficiently to get content from China, I just don't have the will.
The infrastructure here (computers!) have purpose outside of rent - ware. Software exists that can read M$ proprietary file formats, with proper tweaking. and if it's imprtant enough, software will be created to read other proprietary formats, whether they're created with rentware or some other software.
or their software stinks...
we'll get the same thing we get now: a big fuck-u
like, who in their right mind thinks we're gonna get *rent* back if we don't like somebody's software?
when the landlord closes the doors, you better be looking for new digs.
<---[singularity sig]
a company dissolves itself for whatever reason, and the keys disappear. And then another company starts, mysteriously with the same management as the first, and creates a competing product (which happens to be the only one compatible with the proprietary software of the previous company)... thus 'forcing' you to buy the new product(and soon, since your old key is about to run out), and sign into a new, less reasonable, contract for the keys. sounds like a m$ scheme to me... oh wait, m$ is trying to do this ... (I am sorry. I could not resist. M$ is just makes it so easy to insult them)
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
For time-limited software, purchasers should similarly insist on a contractual guarantee that, if the licensing organization goes under without finding a new home for the product, an escrowed infinite-use key will be released.
But, as others have pointed out, this is an issue for "caveat emptor", not more government regulation. If you don't like the risks involved in renting software, either mitigate them contractually per my suggestion, or don't rent software.
--
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Online RPGS potentially have this problem right now. Usually the way it works if the game is sold for about $30-$40, and you pay $10 to play after that. What if the company that owns Everquest or Ultima Online decides they no longer want to run the game? They close thier servers, all the players are SOL. UO has server emulators out there. I guess the same thing could be done with the subscription software. Someone would have to write a server to "emulate" the real keyserver. I wonder if a company could sue someone for providing software keys after the original company stopped providing them.= \=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\
What Will Happen to Rented Software When Its Publisher Sinks?
The same thing that happens when walmart wants to build a store where the apartment complex you live in now sits.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I would care more about what a user could do about the data stored by the software once the software has expired more than the software itself. Software can be replaced, however, what about the data that was stored in a proprietary format by my word processor, or by my tape archive system? In addition I've noticed some people post that it would still be legal to use the software once the company has gone under because they would not be stealing from an existing entity. Not entirely true unless you were authorized to. The companies copyright would still be in effect. They could sue you.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
For a while I've seen alot of people saying that "centralized, rented software" is a bad thing(tm). But realistically, it's a dream for system admins that need to support applications for a large (100+) userbase.
Now, I'm not saying I agree with the rental model, but I think the network model that X windows provides is an interesting and potentially very viable solution to purchasing multiple copies of software "A".
I'd be very interested in seeing technologies like X start to be pulled more into the mainstream office and corporate network models. What technologies exist currently that do this (aside from X)? Are there companies that are pursuing this model of software design?
Cheers,Chris
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
Bingo Foo
---
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
When you rent something, you are allowed the use of that property for the rental period... that's it. End of contract, and end of obligation. Lets say that my company rent's you a hammer, on a yearly basis. For the sake of discussion, lets say it's a magical hammer, and that it's stipulated in the contract that it will disappear in one year. One year later, the hammer disappears and you come back to "Magical Hammer Rentals-R-Us" to get another, only to find that we're going out of business and won't be renting anymore magical hammers. How in the hell could you possibly think that it is "Magical Hammer Rentals-R-Us's" responsibility to find you another hammer, or to give you a magical hammer that would last forever, before we closed our doors? It's a friggin' yearly contract, for crying out loud.... after a year it's OVER, end of obligation!! Now, back to reality. I'm not sure whether or not I like the idea of yearly software "rentals" or not, but it might have it's advantages. Instead of "MS Office" costing $300.00, only to be outdated in 1 1/2 years anyway, it might be beneficial to pay, say $50.00 a year, and get presumably newer versions of said software on a yearly basis. Of course, there's always the possibility that you could use a competing product that you outright buy (or GPL'd software) if you could find one that performed well and did what you needed it to do.
Basically with code escrow, you have the rights to obtain the source code to the product under defined conditions, including the company going under or the product being discontinued. The details of how it's managed vary from contract to contract - the code may be stored with a third party (generally a law firm) or may be retained by the software provider.
The kicker is that escrow contracts have a cost associated with them, and it may not be small (on an absolute scale; if you're doing a $10 million replacement of all your financial software then $100,000 for code escrow becomes just another mid-sized line item). They're also generally term contracts, renewable either when you renew your software license or annually though as with any contract other terms are possible.
-- fencepost
fencepost
just a little off
Your favorite software giant (oh, let's leave it to your imagination) purchases the company selling the product then promptly discontinues it to celebrate Tuesday. The keys expire within a year and POOF!
A slick new way to eliminate competing software might be upon us. (not that anyone I can think of would every do this)...
Most of these services are talking about storing the data on their servers! The big question is: can you get your data back out when the company goes under?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
More importantly, a new license kicks in, so the customer is allowed to use the source code.
Software escrow is expensive, because someone has to pay for auditing the software. The escrow isn't worth much if you're not positive that the source code actually builds the right product.
I've worked at little companies, with big customers, where the big customer demanded source code escrow. I've never been on the other side.
There are many variations. I assume that license keys could also be escrowed.
Many years later we bought a product called Excelerator from Index Technology. This was a terrible piece of crap that only did one thing well: keep you from using it without paying for it. When they went from the MS-DOS version to the Windows version they got rid of the "dongles" and replaced it with something even worse, which was copy control that expired if the product was not upgraded. By the time the software had expired we had lost enough productivity trying to use it that we were willing to just give up on it. My bad experiences with this product helped me to see the value of Free Software.
If you had a contract for a week, and the company went under two days after you signed the contract, they'd have to let you keep it for the duration. A better analogy would be leasing a car, since that's a long term contract. I'd imagine you'd be able to return it for your money back (adjusted for the time you used it).
However, even those analogies fail, because in comparison you'd have to say something like: you lease a car and create luggage that will only fit in that car. You build up quite a bit of luggage, then the company goes under. There is an understanding that you require use of your luggage, so the company includes a failsafe: if we go under, you can purchase the car for it's current value, and continue to use it for your luggage. Or, since we're going under, you can just keep the car.
I have yet to see a good analogy between the problems in the software industry and "the real world". You need to compare to similar items - items that have a huge initial cost to develop and create, but a tiny cost to distribute each individual unit (like software), and not items that have a huge cost associated with each unit (like cars).
All I can say about it is "caveat emptor", but unfortunately this system will be rammed down our throats by the likes of MS, and most people are going to have to live with it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
My university's mathematics department relies heavily on the use of Mathematica (a "god" in the mathematical notation and symbolic problem solving front). I loved it and I bought it -- and found out that there will be a problem if the publisher (Wolfram Research) ever goes out of business...
When you run it for the first time, it notes all your hardware and creates a unique "id" that has to have a matching unique "password" to unlock the software.. sound familiar?
The gist is, when the university decides that their 180 mhz computers just "dont cut it no 'mo" and upgrade, if wolfram isn't there to give out their unique passwords then the university has lost out on QUITE a lot of funding (The student version (full w/o manual) goes for 150 but the retail version (full w/ manual) goes for about 1150).
Now, in these cases would it be "correct" or "right" to reverse engineer the software's security or at least use a keygenerator as found on the little warez kids sites... and what kind of trouble could a university find itself in if they did this?
"What happens when a software company from which you lease goes under?
Suppose the company, without going out of business, decides they do not want to support the software any more? Perhaps they have a new version with more features (and a higher price/rental) that they are interested in pushing? Perhaps they merge with a competitor and now have two similar products competing with each other and decide to kill off one of them? Suppose they want everybody to switch to the (buggy?) version 6.0 so they can close down their v5 support department?
There are any number of ways you could have the rented-software rug pulled out from under you. I guess you had better address that issue before signing on for a particular product and structuring your company's survival around it's continued availablilty!
that's it, yeah
<---[singularity sig]
AFAIK, if a company declares bankrupcy, all assets have to be sold off to pay off as many creditors as possible. I'm sure one such asset would be the ability to sell and generate keys. Since the software could become 'unsupported,' it would be a pretty easy way to cause a steady influx of money for very little work. It could be valued the same way as a bond (i.e., pay $30000 now to get an income of $1000 a month until the software is obsolete).
Lets say you rent a car from some car rental place for 4 weeks. Sometime on week 2, the company is liquidated and they pull out of the car rental business. Now... do you really think that car belongs to you? Even though the people who loaned you the car don't exist? Nope. It belongs to the people with invested interest in the company - creditors. The assets (cars) will be sold off to pay the creditors as much as possible. It is possible that you could *buy* the car for an additional fee, but you may decide to go to another car loan company for your needs.
Unlike the above example, software isn't a tangable thing. You have a right to use the software for as long as your licence term is valid, but once it is no longer valid you are required to stop using it - it no longer belongs to you - even if the company goes under. However, the creditors of the company may choose to do one of two things: (1) sell unlimited licences to recoup any losses, (2) sell the software rights to another company. In case 1, you may be given the chance to get an unlimited version that will never expire. Cool. However, if the company takes route 2 - which is likely if they can get a larger amount of $$$ up front - you'll have to deal with the new company for your needs OR go somewhere else.
The good thing for consumers (on the software loan thing) is that we get to choose month-by-month what software we use. If we get tired of Word, for example, we stop using it and find another product - without wasting the whole cost up front. Say $10 per month for three months until you realize you don't like the software instead of $2000 up front with (as Microsoft seems to want it) no right to sell it to recoup your losses.
Good: Choice, lower costs (short term), keeps software up-to-date.
Bad: Instability of companies, higher cost (long term), someone else controls your software, lack of privacy (?).
You decide.
---
Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I still run PFS Write and Professional Write, long after the company stopped supporting each. The thing that I thought was what if the company is renting out software then suddenly decides it's not going to, for whatever reason? What happens to the software your business needs then?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Then you either pay up to get the data or you go out of business. You can sue the provider but they've already filled for bankruptcy.
Or, say that application is written using Curl from our friends at Curl.com. And... One sad day one of their data entry clerks makes an error and your ASP's monthly payment is credited to the wrong account. This tiny error automatically instructs the curl plug-in in browsers around the world to start refusing to let anyone access the application. Then both you and the application provider go out of business. The ASP dies because of all the suits from pissed off customers and you die because you can't bill your customers. Then Curl.com dies because you all sue them.
Well, probably not. But you get the picture. Everything is connected. Anyone stupid enough to rent software that way or to use spyware like curl gets what they deserve. You see....
Stupidity is its own reward.
StoneWolf
Grey (Chris Lusena)
Escrow a copy of the source code and a copy of the application which generates the keys. The source code is kept up to date with the latest release and well as the key generator. If you bite the big one, the customer then has the right to request a copy of the escrow disk and generate all the keys they need. Many government agencies require this sort of a setup.
This page was generated with the help of DOC++.
This is one of the reasons why IBM was investigated & the prosecution started for anti-trust.
Businesses never liked this model, they wanted control over their destiny. I see no reason to suspect that business has changed much in the intervening 40 years.
I'm currently participating in contract negotiations for a large (niche) software purchase. One of the terms we require to be included in the contract is; if the company goes out of business, we get the source code for all of the software we are licensing. If the company does not agree, we don't purchase the software. I suppose that some companies wouldn't agree to this kind of inclusion, but we generally take the hard line and refuse to purchase the product without it.
Having the perpetual license is an important damage control mechanism. Software companies go bankrupt or they merge and put the customers on a "death march migration plan". We need to have the option of indefinite self-support, so as to keep the existing systems on "life support" long enough to consider our long-term options.
I predict we will see more and more companies (led by M$), trying to make this a "pay-per-click" world. I also predict the free market will continuously reject such initiatives. I don't want to rent an app any more than I want to rent a phone, house, car, clothing, eyeglasses, appliances, furniture, computer, or DVD (remember DIVX???) The final nail in the Rentware coffin is that software rental is an operating expense, whereas software purchase can be capitalized.
The only positive thing I can imagine is that Rentware makes it easier to walk away from a bad decision. If you buy the wrong software, you can eventually stop paying for it and buy something more appropriate next time. I have seen a few systems that were poorly chosen and eventually discarded. Renting those would have been nice. Not as nice as buying the right thing in the first place, but better than a total writeoff.
..is that the failing company's assets will go to whomever purchases them.
The new owner will evaluate the financial prospects of their new stuff (your subscriptions).
If they don't like what they see, they'll end the subscriptions. Just like any magazine. If they're a nice company, they would provide the ex-subscribers some kind of reader app, allowing them to open their old documents, or maybe they may help ex-subscribers convert their old documents' format to one readable by a competitor's app.
But if the software won't make any money.. you won't be using it.
It's an important contract term to check.
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Or not.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I don't trust the goverment for anything, but any company that does rent the software would do well by its customers to, if they are going to fold sometime soon, write a patch or some such that would break the code lock on their software, that or sell the rights off to another company. If they are out of buisness I don't think they should care to much if anybody uses their software. Although if they fail it means that their software was not all that popular in the first place, making the likelyhood that massive amounts of people will want to pirate their stuff highly unlikely, unless they charge insane fees for their software. A better question might be what happens to the patented technology that the company developed when it folds? If the rights to the technology are in Limbo some companies might be in real trouble as their would be noone that could legally provide a similiar service to take the place of the old one. That, to put it mildly, is bad.
Liquidators are in the business of liquidating assets, not in the business of leasing software. Liquidators know absolutely nothing about running a software company. The idea that they would take over the business operations of a failed software company is sheer fantasy.
Here's what will really happen:
The software company ceases operations. It immediately lays off all of its employees and cancels its building lease. All of the physical assets of the company -- mostly computers, backup tapes, and office furniture -- are carted off and stored in a warehouse.
Within days or weeks, a liquidation company will be hired to dispose of the company's assets. They will receive a warehouse full of office supplies and desktop computers, and backup media, some of which happen to contain the only existing copies of the source code to not only the software, but also the program that generates the license keys.
The liquidation company will have orders to immediately liquidate all of the assets in order to pay outstanding bills -- such as unpaid rent on the office the company was based out of.
The liquidation company will know absolutely nothing about the contents of the computers. Most likely, they will have implemented a policy, for their own legal protection, not to sell computers and media without erasing them first. After all, those computers might contain other companies' trade secrets or licensed software, and the liquidation company would be exposing themselves to massive liability if it sold off the computers without erasing them first.
The liquidation company will degauss the backup tapes and label them as bulk-erased media, and they will format the hard drives on the computers and label them as "used computers", then they will place an auction advertisement in the newspaper, and sell off the media and computers.
As a result, the software source code -- and license key generator -- will cease to exist in any form whatsoever.
My company used a simulation package called bones, and like most high end software the only choice is a yearly licenseing agrement. IE RENT! Well dont u know it the company that made bones was bought by its competitor and bam no more licenses, thus no more bones!
When a company gets reorganized, one of the wonderful features is that all the contracts get voided. Which means that any special "I don't want to get screwed" clauses you put in just vanish. (This is a remembrance of I think an InfoWorld article from way back). And yes, I've been personally dumped on by companies vanishing. My very expensive, personally purchased function timing program vendor vanished one day, along with the promised version two.... My old boss had an interesting insight on code escrow: in all the contracts that he'd ever done which required code escrow, not a single customer one ever required that updates be escrowed -- bit rot to the max! Not only that, but with the build tools, it can't be rebuilt anyway.
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If Mathematica is that good and popular, then its likely that Wolfram won't be going out of business anytime soon.
If Mathematica is that good and popular but Wolfram manages to go out of business, then someone would buy the rights to it and likely continue supporting it, including providing key management.
We rent our software to Limousine companies. When we first started this licensing method, many of our customers raised this exact problem. Our solution? Our contract states that if we ever stop providing support for the product, then the source code (which is held in escrow) automatically becomes open source.
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On SALE! 10 Adobe Photoshop .PSD file save keys, .JPGs )
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Once upon a time our math department used Mathematica. They liked it, or at least used it, because it's pretty much standard. They used "Keyserved" copies of the program, which is a little thing which allows software to work only if you log on as a validated user, and only so X number of the program can run at once. Everyone liked this setup just fine.
Then five or so years ago the Mathematica people were developing a new version of the software and Dartmouth was very, very active in the testing and debugging of it. All during the debugging process we used Keyserved copies of the beta software.
Come release time, Dartmouth bought X number of copies of Mathmatica. When they arrived, they weren't Keyserved. "Whoops" we thought "They sent us the wrong software." So we asked them about it and they said "Oh we were never planning to release the final version under Keyserve."
Dartmouth told them in no uncertain terms to stick Mathematica where the sun didn't shine, and we've been using Maple ever since.
I don't know how much money Mathematica lost due to Dartmouth switching, but think of a couple hundred copies of the software (that might be a tad high) at $1500 a piece or something (Keyserved software is generally a tad more expensive than out-of-the-box software because so many more people have access to it), plus countless copies that would have been sold to students and faculty for home use.
That's not a very sound business decision.
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
I know a bunch of people that worked for an ASP (Application Service Provider) in NOVA that went under. The ASP specialized in banking data...What happened???? The customers started to become investors!!! Its better than no data..... I can see it on NetSlaves...Open Source Business Plan Number 4342...Get Customers to commit their mission critical data...threaten to go out of business and to take all their data with them...or..Pay up...
"It's technical in a psychometric kind a way" -- C. Parish
Well it's obvious that people are against this for "regular" business, development and home software, but what about games? The expiration thing is pretty much a moot point for games, because people (for the most part) tend to move on to new things in a fews months or a year anyway. Do you think it'd be viable (and would you be willing to pay for) all games in the manner (not just online RPGs, like Everquest and UO.) ea.com is apparently launching a HBO like service for games, is this a good idea and do you think the industry will go this way in a few years.
I want to open this discussion by saying at first that I'm completely on your side in thinking that software rental is being set up as more of a cash cow for the software companies than as a benefit to the end user. That said, let me address a few points.
/
> So when software rental company "X" says they
> will no longer support / rent product "Y" and I
> have to eventually reinstall the old "Y" due to
> crash / hardware upgrade etc. and they can't
> won't supply me with a key for "Y" any longer??
The idea behind software rental (Microsoft's idea, at least) is that of a "subscription" service. The simple idea is that you subscribe to Microsoft Office, for example, and you pay a monthly fee. While your account is in good standing, you get updates to the program for free (it's part of the rental agreement), so there's never an issue of getting support for an older version or paying for an upgrade, since they just send you the new version when it comes out. In their very highest dream, you don't even have a copy of the software locally; you just log on to an application server and you get the application over the wire (the model pretty much requires broadband) with no upgrade/reinstall issues. The value to you (purportedly) is that you just subscribe, then log in, and you don't have to deal with the trouble of locally installed software. The value for them is that you can't very well pirate a service, and if you stop paying they cut you off.
Based on this model, I present these points:
> Drive up the cost of support through the roof
> from ignorant users constantly hosing their
> products and calling in or choking the web
> servers every other day trying to get new keys.
Ignorant users pay for their support, and for their upgrade keys. The payment will pay for the infrastructure.
> Drive off the corporate customer who just
> won't stand for it.
Corporate customers are well known for standing for virtually anything. Inertia makes them very compliant.
> Make yourself a target for a new breed of
> virii that screws up your registration key.
Being a target doesn't really concern them. If it did, they'd be more concerned about the promiscuity of Outlook and IE. They don't take responsibility for the damage that today's virii do to systems because of bad security in Outlook, so what would lead you to think they'd take calls from key holders?
The simple answer is that the subscription model will be viable for Microsoft because they're such a presence in the market. It won't make it the best model for all companies, but the big ones will certainly be capable of pulling it off.
Y'know, Linux is looking better every day...
Virg
> it notes all your hardware and creates a unique "id" that has to have a matching unique "password" to unlock the software
Yes, and (for the Windows student version, anyway), it's also tied to your partition table. I resized my Windows box (where my student copy of Mathematica resides) once with fips, so I could install a copy of Linux, and when I tried to run Mathematica again, it told me it had an invalid key, and that I had two weeks to get a valid one before it stopped working. I had to request another one (on the plus side, they were quite prompt about it).
I don't forsee software companies willingly implementing a non-expiring key.
Why wouldn't they? The purpose of having keys to begin with (as you pointed out) is to fight piracy. This goes for rental and purchased software. And yet the mother of all anti-piracy zealots (Microsoft, for those not keeping score) has universal keys for their applications and operating systems. Even the new ones like Office XP and Windows XP have universal keys. This just as easily defeats the purpose of having keys to begin with. So I wouldn't be too sure that there wouldn't be non-expiring keys for rented applications.
This whole rental idea on software is a pretty shakey model IMHO. Yes, it keeps the costs of software down for businesses.
No it doesn't. It actually becomes more expensive for the businesses that rent software. It forces them to pay monthly subscriptions for the useful life of the product that they are using, regardless of whether that useful lifetime is 1 year or 10 years. My company has been using Office 97 for 3 years now. Even at the modest subscription rate of $15 per month, that would have cost the company $540 for just the past three years. We get considerably better pricing on licensing now. But what's more, we have no reason to want to upgrade to Office 2000 or Office XP. We're perfectly happy with Office 97. So tack on another couple years of rental for that and you can see quite a bit of additional cost.
The benefactors of software rental are the software companies that end up with guaranteed monthly income for their products instead of having to predict what sales will be like. Sure, they tell you that you get ongoing support and free updates for your $15 per month. But eventually you'll read the fine print and discover that you're allowed 3 free support incidents per year before you start getting charged for it or that you have to dial a support number that costs 25 cents per minute. And if you don't want or need the upgraded version...too bad. You'll have to take it anyways and then take classes to learn how to use it's new features.
Software rental is a racket. It only makes sense if there are absolutely no alternatives to an essential application available for purchasing. And that's only in the vertical markets.
This problem's been around for quite a while in another form. Suppose MightyConglomerate wants to buy software from GarageShop, which doesn't want to release the source code for obvious reasons. MightyConglomerate requires GarageShop to escrow the source code, to be released to buyers in case GarageShop goes under. Its done all the time. It could also be done with keys.
- Your flexlm license runs out, and the software stops working
- You are SOL, and go find another piece of software
- If you're *really* lucky, another company buys out the company that went under, and starts charging you double the old rate.
You pay for rental, not perpetual use. If you want perpetual use, buy something else. If nothing else exists, and you're not smart enough to write your own (aren't all Slashdot readers ubercodegeeks who can re-write Linux in an afternoon?) then too bad.All this article is is the typical "this is why all the world should use GNU/Linux/OpenSource" hype.
If the company went out of business and noone would provide keys to enable on a new system, and you were literally totally cut off from any and all support..
You ask if anything could happen to the univ. if they did this.
Well, one would imagine that if the company is totally gone, there is no one to sue.
If there is someone left with rights that has the power to sue for loses, then that is the same someone that would be required to continue its support or that person/company would probably be liable for damages in the first place.
But if the toaster is patented, in the eyes of the law, you *are* stealing from the producer of the design upon which the toaster is based, even though you actually produce the toaster yourself.
Where large companies purchase software (especially the stuff requiring a yearly renewal) they will in some cases require that the vendor place the source code to the product in escrow with a third party, that in the event of the vendor's closure, discontinuance of the product or bankruptcy, customers will be issued a copy of the source code to the software with right to use internally. Smaller customers may not have the leverage to require this but it is worth asking about.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Actually, I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong) writing your own software would be OK under US patent law, provided you don't sell it. But then, doing so might be more expensive than paying the crappy subscription fee.
Of course, the only ones who won't be affected by a move to subscription models are the big customers who get special deals (i.e. non-rented copies)...
I guess that's what America gets for entrusting its prosperity to corporations...
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Now suppose you release a new generation of operating system and office suite that is rental, with most of the first year rent going to the OEM / computer retailers. But also, suppose that you remove all your previous versions from distribution...
So... The purchasing agent of a company calls the store, "We want to buy 5 more PCs, like the ones we bought last week, like the 1000 we already have." Sure, we can supply them, but the software will be 'rental only'. Nothing else is available."
Some of us have managed to convince ourselves that the latest Frotz text adventure or Mines Of Moria spinoff beats the f*ck out of that new first-person shooter anyhow.
(Except for those "weenie" new linux drinkers who play those new popular ported games... the damn wimps!)
Should a law be required that if such a company goes under, they must either sell the rights to rent keys to another company, or provide non-terminating keys to the current subscribers?"
Let's call the failed company "FailedCo."
FailedCo "notified" their employees of the company shutdown by changing the lock on their door. (Common practice!) They immediately laid off their entire staff and cancelled their lease on their building. The entire contents of the office, including the computers containing the source code to the software as well as the license key generator -- were loaded up into a truck and piled in a non-climate controlled warehouse, pending Chapter 11 proceedings.
As the case drags through bankruptcy court, more and more customers are faced with license key expiration, which means that they are going to be forced to abandon using the software. This makes the "rights to issue new license keys" less and less valuable over time. When the last license key expires, and the last customer has to abandon their software, the "rights to issue new license keys" falls to a value of zero dollars.
Let's say, for argument's sake, that the judge orders FailedCo to "find a company to continue licensing the software to current customers."
No company in their right mind would agree to do so!
Why? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a company, "ReceiverCo", agrees to do so.
First off, they are being asked to take on the business operations of a failed software company, and pay good money for the privilege!
Second, even though they have the rights to sell license keys and continue to maintain and develop the software, ReceiverCo is first faced with a daunting problem.
The problem is a warehouse filled with computers, huge boxes piled full of cryptically labelled or unlabelled floppy disks, 8mm tapes, and zip disks.
Before they can issue a single license key, they have to figure out:
1) Are all the computers intact? Have the hard drives crashed? Do they boot up? Do they have to be networked together in a certain way in order to work? Are some computers NFS servers? Do they have to be manually restarted when they come up? How much time and money is it going to take to figure this out?
2) Which are the important computers -- the ones with the source code and the license key generator, and which computers are unimportant -- the secretary's computer. The "important" computers are probably protected with unknown passwords. What are the passwords? Are the really important computers protected with encryption? How much money will it cost to hire "hackers" to break into all the machines, and sift through the 80 gig hard drives to find the valuable "assets" -- the source code & license key generator?
3) Was the source code left in a buildable state? Remember, all of the developers are gone, and with no warning. Their computers are probably filled with test builds, undebugged source code, obsolete source code, and probably even entire non-working, experimental build-trees. Parts of the program are in C++, parts are in undocumented assembly language, and the internal build scripts are written in an in-house written scripting language that no one outside of the company has ever seen before. What if FailedCo itself has been licensing code from another company, and that license has run out?
4) How do you run the license key generator? Odds are, it isn't a nice, well-written application. Most likely, it's an obscure command-line program, with a non-obvious, non-documented syntax. How do you even know when you've found the license key generator? Is it that binary called "lkg" in the home directory of an account called "lisa" on any one of 35 identical-looking computers? The "lkg" command just spits out "incorrect syntax" no matter what you type, so how do you know if you've even found the license key generator?
Remember, all of the people who staffed FailedCo are gone. They have new jobs. They've filled their heads with new information for their new job, and barely remember this stuff. And their getting laid off was such a bad experience that they have no interest whatsoever in helping ReceiverCo revive FailedCo's products. Or maybe one of them will do the job -- at an extortionate price.
It could literally take months to years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in manpower to conduct what would amount to an archeological dig through all those computers, and reconstruct the license-key granting program & procedure.
All this to secure an asset of unknown value, that is quickly free-falling towards worthlessness.
No company in their right mind would ever do it.
What will really happen is that FailedCo will fail to find a receiver, and the judge will order that the company's assets be liquidated. All the files and computer media -- floppys, backup tapes -- will be either sent to a landfill or bulk-erased and sold as used media, and the computers will have their hard drives either removed and destroyed, or reformatted, and the computers will be sold as "used computers, without windows", at auction.
And the source code and license key generator will cease to exist.
> This would be clever if it weren't so evil.
How dare you?!? Are you implying that things cannot be both clever and evil?!? All of my plans are both clever and evil!
Virg
If the word processing software at my firm expires due a circumstance described in this post turning back the clocks on all of our servers/workstations is simply not an acceptable solution.
The option of selling the rental key rights seems like a viable one. It provides some closing capital to the failing company for paying off their outstanding debts and the new company gains an existing customer base and a revenue stream. I can envision funding companies that crop up and do nothing other than rent out keys from failed companies. They don't have to produce any new software -- merely continue renting out they keys to the existing versions until the customer decides to switch to another vendor.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
[theoretical scenario snipped]
Well, I watched one company in this situation go down -- whose business was in telecom equipment. Its customers were major internaitonal players: TeleDanmark, Deutsche Telecomm, Cable & Wireless.
About three months after the business was sold, & the hard assets were auctioned off (I heard it was a rushed affair, & assets went for pennies on the dollar), one of the former employees was back in business working with these customers. The story I heard was that he got his hands on the source code, was able to hire a number of staff whom he thought were talented, & sold support for this legacy product.
I'm not sure just how he got ahold of the source code: whether he (or a fellow coworker) started to implement an unofficial backup archive at his home, or he approached the major creditor, cut a deal & they made sure certain records were not deleted.
Sometimes a product *can* survive the death of a company. Maybe there's hope for WordPerfect yet!
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
The moral of the story is obvious. One should only rent commodity products for which there are many alternate sources, available on short notice. The rental car example should be obvious. If you have a mission critical job, you should insist on owning the software (and hardware). Ideally, you should insist on owning the source code too.
Anybody who buys into Microsoft's .NET, where they don't seem to know what there pricing model is or what the leasing terms will be, will get exactly what they deserve. When the .NET salesman comes around, ask him who is the alternate source.
Ask him what will happen to lessees who are put on "the enemies of Microsoft" list. Would Oracle or Sun Microsystems be able to lease anything on .NET?
Divx failed because nobody wanted to plug their phone into their VCR. It wasn't because 'the public' rejected the concept of pay-per-view with a bandwidth boost called 'a piece of plastic' (equivalent to the famous 'station wagon full of tapes' from Unix folklore).
Too many people on the net 'cheer' as if they defeated Divx. It failed in the marketplace, not in Usenet threads filled with people who hated it.
And it failed because of the particular implementation, not because people refuse pay-per-view, which is a fairly successful venture in the Cable industry.
If the company goes under, though, it's often because something was wrong with the product. Liquidators aren't going to rush in to repeat the mistakes that the previous company made. They're going to be leery about just grabbing hold of the reins and continuing to rent the software. And as I said, they have to decide if they want to spend the money figuring out if the product is a stinker or not. The business analysts needed to make certain it was because of corporate practices, and not a stinking product, are expensive. It's not safe to assume things will just go on as they did.
The liquidation company will know absolutely nothing about the contents of the computers. Most likely, they will have implemented a
policy, for their own legal protection, not to sell computers and media without erasing them first.
That's why so much nice Sparc hardware is available on eBay, but minus the hard drives. I've even bought used hard drives from one vendor, plugged them into a Sparc 5 from a different vendor, and had the machine boot up with a totally different build of Solaris than the machine originally had. I suspect the guy who sold me the hard drive would have been in deep trouble if the orignal owners knew they were being sold unwiped on eBay.
This discussion raises an interesting question in my mind -- how well do these schemes work with VMware? Suppose I created a VMware virtual computer running my favorite OS and installed Mathematica on it? Can't I run that VM on other computers and expect it to work? Since the hardware is virtualized, I would think that you could run this same VM over and over again. Just a thought. Has anybody tried this?
All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!!
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
Actually, I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong) writing your own software would be OK under US patent law, provided you don't sell it.
Actually, United States patent law includes language to the effect that to "make, use, or sell" an invention under a subsisting patent without permission of the patent owner is patent infringement. (Read More at USPTO.gov.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
For those of you who doesn't know, Flexlm is a license management software from Globetrotter.
Many software vendors use it to protect their applications in price range of 1,000 to 1,000,000 USD.
It used to be really easy to crack versions up to 6.0 and create a perpetual license that would work on any host. However, I have never seen any of such licenses on the Internet. Customers remain honest and there is no much demand for such cracked licenses.
I think this is mainly because they value the support and maintenance, not the bits and bytes.
With mass-market software, like M$Office, the picture is different. I am sure any "rental" version of it will be cracked within days, with cracks posted everywhere.
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I dislike Mathematica and its retarted syntax, who the hell types Sin[x]. I hate its bloatedness, its bugs, and I really hate the $hitty UNIX version that looks like a 5th grader ported, when it has been on UNIX forever
I am not a big fan of Maple either. It crashes too much, and it can't factor worth a crap.
Use Maxima instead. It's free, GPL, fast, feature full, and has a clean interface, all LISP.
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/maxima.html
... with web-based applications. Think about it: with web-based apps moving into the forefront as serious competition for desktop software, the plot thickens even more.
With "subscription model" desktop software, if worst comes to worst, it's usually possible to crack the app and continue using it. With web-based apps, when the server goes "buh-bye", you're simply screwed.
This raises an interesting conflict in my mind: (1) I love the potential for web-based apps [for many reaons, including the fact that I code], (2) I definitely don't want to be screwed, and there are a lot of programs I wouldn't dream of using as a hosted service (think "personal info abuse").
I won't be losing sleep tonight, but there are serious concerns here. I sure as hell wouldn't want my customers losing apps or data because my company went out of business.
High-quality Linux web hosting for geeks and coders.
If there is someone left with rights that has the power to sue for loses, then that is the same someone that would be required to continue its support or that person/company would probably be liable for damages in the first place.
When a f__ked company dies, a holding company buys up its assets, including GGM[0] rights. The holding company may then discontinue the product and support therefor, leaving you with no central license servers.
"So crack it." Four letters: DMCA. And even a copyright owner brings about no legal action, the Federal government can still prosecute criminal copyright infringers in the US.
Rented software (and proprietary software in general) give me too much discomfort for me to continue using them more than absolutely necessary. A large library of free software makes this "absolutely necessary" absolutely small.
[0] Government Granted Monopoly. I prefer this term to "IP" (intellectual property) because it more accurately describes how the United States Code treats copyright, trademark, and patent issues.
Will I retire or break 10K?
while this may work on some software, in my father's field (mechanic), many of the software use a third party clock mechanism. In particular, a piece of software called "ALL Data", which stores diagrams/books etc on cd/dvd have a little dongle to attaches to your parallel port. The software will not run without it, and the dongle has its own clock, so setting the date back is useless. We have literally stacks of useless CD/DVDs now, because All Data was absorbed by Mac tools, and was discontinued.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
My company received copies of source code when a vendor went out of business sometime in the 1970s. The vendor or the product line may have been called SNAP; sorry but these details are dim in my memory. :-)
Quis metamoderunt ipses metamoderatores?
The issue is that, assuming that they have an ungodly long list of software, like MS does nowadays (just look up their support services / bug report webpage) Then it would be hell to determine how many people were working on a specific project, what was their main project and the side projects (game development, windows code and maybe a small part of an application here and there) Where would the source for things like game animations, clipart, wizards, DLLs... be stored and what is MS's policy for keeping things organized? Actually, since it is such a closed source company, it would be even harder to know how to put the millions of lines of code together for the bulk of its multiple OS's.
I can't see the world without Windows or DOS, specially 3rd world countries that contribute close to 0 in software bulk... let alone whole operating systems. (Heck, when was the last time we saw something that was known to have started outside the US besides those pesky email viruses?) If MS fell apart, like is reasonable with anything powered by programmers, then the application software bulk would continue to grow at a slower pace while a few companies slowly switched to the alternative operating systems to garantee their own stay in the Apps / System support Utilities market. Then a new empire would eventually emerge from the prevalent OS and perhaps bring new twists to the annoying historical facts we're bound to repeat in a future without MS.
</Thinking cap >
Sigh. I believe we deserve a brighter future than this. Can any OS garantee that our processors will have fresh code to run forever, or do we have to start hardwiring OS's to make sure those won't expire as well?
"Wireless : LAN
Don't buy software from such companies. Then they'll sink SOONER, rather than later. And your critical data won't be locked up in proprietary formats you can no longer open.
/. whiner (though I am usually ;). This could be a viable business plan. When your competitors' software ceases to run and they lose their work, you will be in the lead because your company wasn't foolish enough to accept such a risky business model.
I'm actually serious folks, not just being a anti-corporate
However, as soon as a really major company feels the bite of this, there will probably be a huge lawsuit against whatever company discontinued their software leasing. And that might change things. Until then, about all we can do is boycott such software in the desktop market.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Maxima rocks. There's an interface too, at http://symaxx.sourceforge.net, that has some interesting features. It may not be as flashy as Mathematica, but for school use it will do the job just fine. And unlike the student version of Mathematica, it doesn't be come illegal to use it when you are no longer a student.
(Pay HOW much to get software with a time bomb in the license? I'm on a student budget here. Even a hundred odd bucks means a lot.)
Check it out! Maxima can do symbolic integration, handle linear algebra stuff, plot 3D functions, and lots more. Symaxx (when working properly - it is in beta right now) can handle gnuplot stuff, output in TeX, map dependances between expressions (the interface is unique in my experience - take a look at a screenshot to see what I mean.)
Maxima is based on the same fundamental core that Macsyma was, before it folded. Macsyma's interface was super-cool, but all we can do now is start up our own open source projects around Maxima. Maybe someday we will equal and exceed the capabilities of the commercial packages, but even now Maxima will handle most stuff students would want to mess with.
The symaxx site has maxima RPMs for the most current version, and Debian users can get it using apt-get (I think the new one is in the unstable branch.) Symaxx itself is perl, so you don't need to compile it, but check the instll instructions because there are a few depends to take care of. If you don't care for symaxx, there is a tcl program called xmaxima included with 5.5. Us it rather than command line - the terminal command line interface of maxima needs work.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
It is not much different than the fraudulent business called rent to own where you rent furniture for several times what it is worth. Software for rent from microsoft will target the same kind of morons who think they get a good deal with "rent to own".
Now, when you buy the rights to distribute renewal keys, you own them. What's so hard about finding a pretty talented cracker, pay him $10k to write one for you? I don't think it's illegal to develop a crack for software you already own the rights to. Then it really does'nt matter whats left rotting in a warehouse.
Now get a programmer to write a script that can execute the code generator on a secured server, and viola! You've got a pretty nifty software renual business with virtually zero overhead.
The Internet is generally stupid
This is bullshit. Million of people have satellite
receivers and you have to plug it to the phone
to keep your service and we have pay per view.
The problem with divx is that the CDs wouldn't
work unless you pay extra. When I buy a tape
or a CD it is to keep it and watch it again.
This is why I refused to buy divx and perhaps
the same reason a lot of other Americans choose
not to buy them.
agreed.
:)
in this case, i don't think it'd be unreasonable for megacorp to demand an escrow of the source code to garage-shop's leased application either. (forget keys, they're usually temporal)
it is the perfect solution that almost any reasonable software company would be willing to accept.
i know some pretty large companies that did this very thing while they were still wee little 5-person shops
cheers.
Peter
What if the rented software doesn't even reside on the purchaser's servers, but is run instead (e.g. via SOAP) from the manufacturer's server farm? Here not just a key, but most of the code is off-site. This is Microsoft's vision for the next version of Office, and for software in general.
In this case, if the company goes under, there seems to me to be no alternative to switching to new software. One nasty result: businesses will only rent from established companies, not startups. Because of the startup goes under, its customers cannot chug along until they are ready to switch to a new product: they well have to switch almost immediately, at exorbitant costs of retraining etc.
I'm not sure, but I believe that the serial key for the mathematica program is not on the cd you receive when you buy it. I've been told that Wolfram actually has a central authentication server that generates and verifies all the keys, and when you register a copy of mathematica the program calls up the central server to check the key.
:-)
:-)
So the only way to reverse engineer the key generation routine would be to somehow break into the auth server. I've also heard rumors that the auth server isn't even connected to anything, and that to register you have to wait for a response from wolfram with a correct code to unlock the program, since they are so paranoid.
More rumors
Wolfram is so paranoid about Mathematica because of what happened when he was creating it. He did most of the work on it when he was a grad student or something at Caltech, and when he finished, Caltech tried to say "Hey, you made that while you were here, it's ours." Wolfram was like, "I don't think so," a long legal battle ensued, Wolfram won (surprisingly, Caltech's army of lawyers normally crushes people in situations like this), but ended up very, very paranoid.
Hm, I'm not sure I can verify anything I just said. Oh well
You should be able to buy the remaining assets of the company for a dollar and the cost of shipping. Don't know if this would help any, though.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Which proves how silly the law is.
War is necrophilia.
Example of such insurance: they will pay you say $1M if they fail to be available to you sooner than say 1 year after your last paid period of service ends.
Solution to your question is not responsibility of company, but yours as a customer and user. Either you trust the company and put yourself at risk or buy software which can be used even after manufacturer goes bankcrupt.
hany
Yeah but who are you? You're only the guy who shelled out the cash for the product! They don't care about you! They just want your money!
Wake up!
radsoft.net
In my work I have sold (and also programmed) some large systems for some goverment institutions.
Even though we were not renting the software, the customer wanted another company to have the binaries and the source code's of the program as well. (I can't remember the word, but there is actually a legal term for this kind of third organization).
Of course there are strict rules of when the third company can look at source code, but anyway.
The big organizations have, for as long as I can remember, been covering their asses for software vendor and software support organization bankrupcyies.
What kind of agreements could home users do, I'm not sure. But I think it is not so big issue.
FFlashplease proff read !
> Escrow doesn't work if FailedCo (or perhaps just the FailSoft product) is bought out by a competitor who wants to kill the product
a ti on.html
Surely that depends on the terms of the escrow agreement? Qt isn't rented of course, but Trolltech have taken steps to ensure that the free product will always be available:
http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce/found
"Should Trolltech ever discontinue the Qt Free Edition for any reason including, but not limited to, a buyout of Trolltech, a merger or bankruptcy, the latest version of the Qt Free Edition will be released under the BSD license."
--
rant
I've been using Windows 98 for two and half years - in that time it's hung a handful of times.
I've been using Word for much longer and never had it trash my documents - although it has saved my skin a couple of times by recovering a document for me. To be fair I only use it for small documents - maybe 3 or 4 times a month - so I'm not exactly stressing it.
As for Outlook - I've used it constantly at work for the last 3 years. I rely it on it. It's always been completely stable. The only problem I've had is the FunLove virus. I haven't seen another email client with as much functionality, capacity and stability. There's certainly no free software (that I'm aware of) that will handle the volume of email I go through at work.
I'm no Microsoft zealot at all - but I have found the stability and useability of these programs to be acceptable. If your experience is that Win 98, Word and Outlook crash, hang and corrupt your files more than 1 in 20 times - you've either had very bad luck or you need some help with configuration.
Mind you, escrow is a) expensive and b) a pain to manage for the licensor (for example think about the headache of having to send the escrow agent a copy of new versions, releases, etc.); which is why some software companies will refuse to put their code in escrow... But in my experience, large corporations "buying" (or renting) from GarageShop (or even any company under 100 employees) will often require it.
There's nothing new here people, let's move on.
The dot-com situation was crazy, and look what happened to _that_. The thing with situations that are crazy is that they're not necessarily self-sustaining, they break down... particularly if you don't prop 'em up by proclaiming, "Hey, crazy as it is, this is the reality!". It may be more temporary than you think....
Nope, not open source (we are not in that part of the software business, nor do we want or need to be) but escrowed source. What many open source zealots don't think of is the staff costs to keep knowledgable programmers who can write good code around is $$$$ high $$$$ -- I don't mean hacks I mean decent long term maintenance programmers -- it's not sexy but it's a neccessity. What we pay in license and maintenance fees is offset by that cross company experience that our vendor has and gains. We negotiate price with them and if they don't have the experience and the product they don't get the contract. In this sort of instance open source would give us more control but at a greater price -- a price we don't want or need to pay.
Our business is NOT developing that software but performing our prime function.
Your choice. No one is twisting your arm to use the product. Don't like it? Write a competing product. That's the way business works. Welcome to the real world.
Hello? This has been the case for over 10 years. It's called Leased Software, and your license key/dongle/license server has an expiration date that you have to pay to renew each year, and if the company fails, you're SOL.
The model usually applies to high-end packages like CAD/CAM/CAE software that cost $10k/year (or more). Software like ProEngineer(3d-solid CAD), WorkView (2D Schematic Capture), and Ansys (Thermal Modeling?), Saber (Analog Circuit Simulation), and etc. all use a time-bounded networked license scheme (FlexLM) to control the software.
That's why, as part of your software evaluation, you should include a financial report on the company so you will have an idea of what type of risk you are in should they fail.
This is no different.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
they can copy your personal data from one rented application provider to another. Check out their web site for a demo. http://www.serviceswitch.com
Those discs are coasters or modern art now. You can't watch them anymore.
My only hope is that Microsoft suffers the same fate as Divx in it's rental software venture.
The day Divx went out of business I went down to the local Circuit City and bought a useless divx coaster for $1.00 and then danced on it in the parking lot. Where we gonna dance when Micro$oft does the same? Seattle's a bit of a trip from Holland, MI!
And we used to buy used mainframe hard drives from a major used equipment vendor. The most fun part of receiving the new drives was looking to see what had been left unerased on the drives by the previous owner. We found railroad shipping manifests, parts databases, source code to scientific software, customer lists. Absolutely incredible stuff. Eventually, the vendor wised up and started clearing the drives before shipping them out.
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The first *THREE* times I read this article's title, I read it as:
What Will Happen to Rented Software When Its Publisher Stinks?
I thought it was a thinly-veiled stab at Microsoft.... oh well...
--
I was thinking that the only way to crack it would be to decompile the program, search for the part of the program that generates the keys and reverse engineer the algorithm.
:-)
Other methods hadn't occurred to me
Moller