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Hardware Manufacturers Gouging Customers
rahlquist writes "An article over at infoworld discusses that buying that used router on ebay may not be a good deal if Cisco can find its way to screwing you. What's next, buy a used Ford and pay Ford to transfer the license for the onboard computer's OS or face piracy charges if you continue to drive?"
Agreed. The stupidity seems to be endless. Granted, I run a relatively small network provisioning firm, but I'm very tempted to root out all Cisco equipment and replace it with alternatives that utilize open standards.
EIGRP may be an excellent protocol, likely better than OSPF, but for my money, OSPF is my choice because it doesn't lock me down to a vendor.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Someone owns a whole bunch of Cisco routers or other miscellaneous equipment. Once the equipment is no longer needed, they retain the license to the software while selling the hardware to someone else. Cisco rep complains, new hardware owner says "talk to the software licensee". When purchasing maintenance agreements and such, the hardware owner pays off the software licensee the cost of the maintenance agreement plus a small surcharge, and the software licensee pays Cisco the amount on Cisco's price list for the maintenance agreement.
The terms of the license agreement are fulfilled - it's just that the on-site location is changed.
When companies get greedy like this, it's all I can do to keep my calm. I'm not sure I agree that all information wants to be free, but used sofware licenses that are bound to hardware that is changing hands sure do.
The CB App. What's your 20?
hate to say it, but you gotta know what you're buying. both used and new. maybe it will awaken some eyes to open source/open standards, what have you, but if you buy something you need to know if you can resell it (as opposed to a leasing, or trading in with the manufacturer), if that is your plan.
as a side note, my father worked for pitney bowes (they sell shipping,mailing, and postage systems) for many years. they did the same with their shipping systems and software. of course, most old PB systems got traded in for newer systems, there were few in the 2nd hand market. so it's not just in the IT world.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
More importantly, when you bought it (perhaps from someone like CDW) you bought the entire thing, there wasn't even an option to buy just the hardware. Now they want to claim they are two different parts???!!! That's completely bogus; if CDW can sell it to you then you can sell it to someone else. Also, if you did decide to sell the hardware and then sell the software to someone else, the legal principle known as Right of First Sale pretty much says that you indeed can sell the parts, even if NetApp doesn't like it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Surely you mean:
FREEZE! HANDS UP! This is the BSA! We know you have illegal routers that you bought 100% legally. We are coming in, and want everyone to lie flat on the ground away from the routers. Comply and no one gets hurt (well financially everybody except us gets hurt).
No?!?
If you sell your used hardware to someone, then from the corporate viewpoint, YOU are depriving them of their right to sell NEW hardware to that person, hence you are infringing on the rights of a corporation !?! Lordie this country is hosed in the head....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The point is, they want to encourage these eBay bargain shoppers to buy new stuff (curtailing the secondary market). As a result outdated hardware would just be tossed, because no one would want it (it would cost less to buy it new!). They are hoping that everyone will continue to buy all new hardware, and no one will be interested in used gear anymore. I suspect, however, that a large portion of the customers they hope to gain from this simply won't buy anything, because they won't be able/willing to fork over the cash for it.
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Crudely Drawn Games
This makes perfect sense for the hardware companies, when you buy a high end router, you aren't paying just for the box, the metal, and the wires, but also for the IOS
,the wheels and the engine,but also for the software which controls the engine.
When you buy a Ford you don't just pay for the doors, the roof
So that does also make pefect sense to you?
For me not being allowed to transfer a software license still doesn't make sense.
Some managerial types have some very odd ideas about money. I knew a person who ran a motel back in the 1980's. He was charging $50/room in an area where the standard price was around $40/room. Needless to say he didn't rent very many rooms. A friend of mine was his accountant, and he suggested that the motel owner drop his prices to rent out more rooms. Mr. Idiot was horrified at the idea: "If I did that, I'd be loosing $10 on ever room I rented!" Apparently he had the fixed idea that when a room was rented he somehow deserved $50, so it was preferable to him to rent very few rooms at a higher price than to rent more rooms at a somewhat lower price. Eventually he went out of business.
Doubtless the same sort of idiocy is going on here.
The hardware manufacturers have always hated sale of used hardware. Using software licensing this way is just a club to try and smash the used hardware market, it has nothing to do with them worrying about their precious little software license being violated. One copy of software was bought, one copy of software exists. In this situation they have been paid for every copy of the software being used; no piracy is taking place. The entire "You bought a software license from us, and you can't sell that" line is total tripe. It may be legal, but it damn sure isn't right. The law needs to be changed to prohibit that sort of crap.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Some net app boxes are nothing but Dell servers in disgise :) i have converted many of them to realy nice dual cpu 64bit pci file servers running linux with hardware raid
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
It's the seller fault for not telling the buyer about this. The seller originally agreed to the license, and should have pointed out the extra charge on eBay before bidders began bidding. A real estate lender has to do this before you apply for a loan. It's called a Good Faith Estimate, and it spells out the charges other than the monthly mortgage.
Go after the seller, not Cisco.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Their practices appear to violate the doctrine of first sale, which the Supreme Court has been found to heavily favor in the past. The parts of the agreement that govern the non-transferablility of the license could be invalidated if this were ever challenged in court. I think it would only take one lawsuit from a large corporation like a bank to take care of these prohibitive licensing terms. In the past, portions of contracts and complete contracts have even been invalidated because of terms that were not binding due to laws forbidding them. This could just be one of many of those.
Double taxation.
Not so. The car is not taxed, the sale of the car is taxed. When you bought the car, you paid a tax based on the value of the transaction. When you sold the car, the purchaser paid a tax based on the value of that transaction. Two separate transactions, two separate tax payments.
You are taxed on your paycheck and then when you invest your money and it generates income it is taxed again.
double taxation.
Wildly not so. You are taxed on your paycheck, then you are taxed on the income that your investment earned. The same money is not taxed twice. In fact, to a certain extent, if your investment results in a loss, you can exclude the amount of that loss from your taxable income.
I think that you would be hard pressed to find a situation where you paid the same tax twice for the same thing. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist...just fleetingly rare.
-h-
I am not a lawyer. I am not an accountant. I am not an economist. I am an engineer.
This isn't like Gamer PCs, where you _need_ a 4.77 GHz machine to keep up, or a Microsoft Office machine, where MS keeps making Office bigger and using the newer features of Windows, so you need to upgrade Windows, but you can't upgrade to Windows 2006 without upgrading to at least a 2GHz machine with 6.40GB of RAM. This is much more like the 486 Linux machine sitting in the corner acting as a DNS and DHCP server, or the Pentium 133 you're using as an X terminal.
But there are two popular reasons to sell a used router. One is that you're upgrading to a bigger router, and as you say, everyone wins including the router vendor. The other reason is that your dot-com died (or was bought by somebody who already had enough bandwidth in their offices) and you're selling the routers, the PCs, the chairs, the cubicle walls, and the t-shirts, and nobody's buying any new router except your happy E-Bay customer, and the router vendor loses a sale they might have gotten.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've got an SGI in the garage I bought for $40. Original price on that model was more like $6000. If SGI told me that I had to pay $1250 to relicense Irix for it, and tried to convince me that this was a bargain (after all, it's 75% off!), do you think I'd agree? Do you think I'd pay it?
(Actually, I haven't touched the box in a year. I need to just get rid of it.)
I'm surprised that since the object for Cisco is to prevent the resale of their routers, and this "relicensing" affront to the first sale doctrine is just a smokescreen, that they haven't pulled a Microsoft, joined eBay's "Verified Rights Owner" program and started killing any auction that contained the word "Cisco."
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Cisco and NetApp don't have monopolies; their competitors should be able to out-compete them on this point.
Why is it in their competitors best interest to do so? The current situation benefits all hardware manufacturers. If they were to stomp Cisco and NetApp out of existence by proclaiming "buy us and you won't have to relicense" they'd wind up with the same problems trying to get customers to buy their new line. Just because they made a bunch of sales in the short term by getting new customers doesn't mean that they'll be viable in the long term when they need to sell their new and improved widget. That's the real issue here: continued sales and growth. The non-transferable license not only makes perfect sense towards these ends, but may be essential to achieving them. Even if they did try to use this issue to overtake Cisco and NetApp it would most likely just be in the short term; until they'd have enough clout to announce a "change in licensing practices to better serve of valued customers".
The above may sound like a justification of this "business practice". It isn't. I think this issue and ones like it are symptomatic of how our economic and legal systems are out of whack with regard to the sale of "intangible" things like software.
The thing is, the market should be sorting this out.
When it comes to bad business practices in general, yes. But the fundamental problem here is that the law is not being applied properly. When the law itself is wrong then it is not a market issue, the law needs to be fixed. In general "free market forces" cannot fix legal problems.
There is a legal doctrine called "Right of First Sale".
US CODE COLLECTION: TITLE 17 CHAPTER 1 Sec. 109
the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.
If you buy a book you have a legally guaranteed right to sell that book. That is why used book stores are legal. The same goes for CD's, video tapes, DVD, computer games, paintings, sculptures, poetry, cassettes, EVERYTHING.
You bought one copy you have the right to have a garage sale and sell that one copy. Once the copyright holder has created and sold that copy he has made his profit and has no further claim upon that particular copy. It may be transfered freely.
The problem here is that they are playing games with the word "owner". It is intened to cover anyone who pays for the legal possession of that copy. They are claiming that you are not the owner of that copy.
There have been bills floating around congress to correct this and other related poblems by changing occurrences of "owner" to "rightful possessor". Unfortunately it hasn't gone through yet.
Another thing, as far as I can tell this "licencing scheme" isn't actually legal anyway, though I know that the courts have been treating them as legitimate. Copyright holders can ONLY licence the right to make copies, the right to distribute copies, and teh right to public performance. If they don't grant you one or more of these rights then NO LICENCE EXISTS. Nor does a contract exist unless they offer something of value and you INTENTIONALLY CHOOSE to accept that offer. You are never bound by any contract that you have not chosen to be bound by.
Once they sell you a disk or any other medium with the software on it the law already SPECIFICLY grants you the right to install and run that software. You are perfectly free to reject the licence and install/use the software anyway so long as you are willing to pass on anything else they may offer in the licence.
Anyone who rejects my argument about linces can ignore all of that and just go back to what I said earlier about the bill floating around congress to fix the law by changing occurrences of "owner" to "rightful possessor". I don't know why it hasn't passed yet. Probably meddling from the copyright lobby.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
But while Cisco is still the Big Dog, they are by no means the only Big Dog. Fuck 'em if they want to play that game, they can take their ball and go home.
There are many other QUALITY options now. Let Cisco and Microsoft grow old and die together.
Take an old clunker, two nics and go to
http://smoothwall.org/beta/
and download the latest package, smoothwall 2.0 Orient.
It's free. It works. You can find clunkers everywhere for free.
I refurb old clunkers and load smoothy on them.
I resell them and make a few $$$ for my pocket,
keep stuff out of the land fill and make some
customer very happy for saving them BIG $$$$....
Personally, I can't agree with this. First, I actually like McD's hamburgers, for what they are: they're inexpensive, and taste decent. If I'm travelling and want a fast, cheap meal, McD's is a safe, consistent, and easily accessible choice. No, they're not the equivalent of a 1/2-lb burger at a serious restaurant, but they don't try to be either.
But the other problem I have is that they "win" in any polls. I've never heard anything like this, and I've never met anyone who though McD's had the best burgers. In fact, most people I know seem to hate them. I'd definitely be very interested to see any polls where people favored McD's burgers to real burgers at a real sit-down, high-price restaurant.
I also disagree with the Windows comment, and think that's grossly insulting to McDonald's. McD's fills a certain niche: they make cheap, decent-tasting (compared to anything else in the same price range), quickly-available food. They're also very consistent. Go to any McD's around the country, and the menu will be pretty much the same, and the food will be identical. Sure, a few franchises might be poorly maintained but overall McD's does a good job of making all their franchisees meet a certain level of quality, so you can expect this no matter where you go. Basically, in the "fast-cheap-good" triangle, McD's favors the fast and cheap. Windows, OTOH, is very expensive, not fast at all, and by the accounts of most techies not that great. Also, MS markets Windows as though it were really great; McD's does not try to convince anyone that their burgers are better than $10 burgers.
I think a better comparison would be with Nissan's 200SX marketing campaign about 5 years ago, where they were claiming that their little econocar was better than a $100k+ exotic car.
is the fault of idiots... idiots who are willing to agree to such licensing terms. If customers would just grow some gonads and say "NO," then these terms would never come into existence.
We live in a market economy - the Windows license got so bad becuase everyone accepted it. Cisco can charge more to relicense an O/S than they charge for a new router because idiots will pay it, or buy another Cisco router (!).
We have three fundamental problems:
1) People don't read anymore.
2) Most people, thanks to our wonderful public education system, are functionally illiterate and wouldn't be able to understand a license written in legalese if they _did_ read it.
3) people think that one maker of a commodity makes better widgets than another maker of that commodity. This is a complete fallacy.
A while back I was "inspecting" (read: opening up) some networking equipment and found that of four 8-port COTS switches, three of them used the EXACT SAME design. There were only very minor layout changes - but the BOM was the same (mostly because the IC vendors issue reference designs).
We need to get off this notion that things we buy are different from other things and realize that all of this garbage is just commodity. Buy on terms, not on names or price.
In Statistics 101, you hear about the "sample size". The sample size relates to the confidence interval, which is a range of values you expect the actual value to be. In this case, the actual value is the failure rate of all IBM or Company X drives, not just the ones you tested. With a hundred samples, your confidence interval is going to very small, meaning that your estimate is probably very close to the actual value. With only two samples, the confidence interval is going to be very wide, because you can't be sure it's not a fluke.
When you bring a time-scale into it, you either have to measure the failure rate over the same time period, or measure the mean time between failure (MTBF), which is more informative. Technically, in the scenario given, 100% of Company X drives did fail within the same period that IBM's drives were being tested. If they fail in the first five minutes or in the last five minutes of those five years, they still failed. But again, with a sample size that low, you can't use that to reach any kind of conclusion.
However, if you measure the MTBF, even with a small sample size, I think you can say with reasonable confidence that the MTBF of the IBM drives is higher than Company X's, simply because the wide confidence interval (the region of uncertainty) of Company X's MTBF still wouldn't quite make it out to five years.
Of course, none of this takes into consideration the fact that IBM's drives aren't made by IBM anymore, and that (from the words of an ex-IBM engineer) Hitachi doesn't know how to make hard drives worth shit.
>I can't think of a better turn of events to bring
>the issue to the common man than to have
>copyright laws prohibit buying and selling cars
Huh? What does copyright laws have to do with that? Copyright laws doesn't prevent you from selling, say, a book you bought or anything else just becayse there is something that has a copyright "in" it. Copyright laws deals with making copies , doing public performace and such.
What is the issue is contract laws and any special contract you may have done at the same time you purchased something but again, that has nothing to do with copyright laws.
Godspeed to the developers of alternative OSes for this hardware.
Once again the Slashdot reaction is totally off base. No wonder SCO and Microsoft have so much trouble taking this crowd seriously.
From the article:
"...when he contacted NetApp to purchase a maintenance agreement for the used system."
Two key words there: maintenance agreement.
First you have to remember that nobody is REQUIRED to provide that service. If you come to me and ask me to provide a service then I'm going to tell you what I will do and how much I want for it. If you don't like it then you can look elsewhere.
Anything else would be the same as you holding a gun to my head and forcing me to provide the service on your terms. That certainly isn't a fair business deal.
So you want to compare this to a Ford. Fine. Go get yourself a 96 Ford Contour with 100,000 miles on it from someone advertising in the local classifieds. Then drive or tow the thing down to your local Ford dealer and demand that they sell you a maintenance agreement for the same price as a current production model.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Oh, you're back? Where's the car? Lemme guess, the guys at the dealership ended up pissing themselves from laughing so hard.
Maybe you should try again. Got that old Compaq 386 laptop out in the garage? Give Compaq/HP a call right now and tell them you want a 5 year maintenance agreement on the damn thing and you're not paying a penny more than $500 for it.
It must be because these are all corporations, right? We all know that anyone trying to do business and make a living is evil.
How about you? Would you want to operate the way Michael Tague expects?
Somehow I don't think that Mr. Tague would do business this way either if he were on the other side.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
In the case of Cisco... around the time of the Sept. 15, 2000 document, they were seeing an increasing amount of virtually new hardware entering the marketplace for pennys on the dollar from all these failed dot-com's for which Cisco was never paid. It's not a big leap to see how Cisco would want to stop that immediately. And if they can come up with this vague, unspecified cash-cow of a "recertification" process, then it's even better for Cisco.
Having seen what little is available on this laughable process, I'd rather start my own router company than deal with the bullshit. $7000 to "inspect" a 7206VXR. They will only do the inspection during business hours (8-5M-F); the router will be powered down and disassembled during the process; only Cisco is allowed to be present at the inspection. And the best part: it's a binary process... it either passes or fails. No other information is provided -- i.e. why it failed and what we need to do it get it to pass.
Oh but actually, they could screw you in other ways. Ford could weld the hood shut and make up a contract with the sale of every car that no one but a licensed Ford mechanic can service the car, and all knowledge of parts is under NDA, and parts on the street are illegal (pirate) parts, and so on.
They could also Lexmark you by having the parts 'expire' at certain times, requiring you to get the car serviced. Of course you won't know which part 'expired' because of the NDA and the DMCA that's preventing online distribution of the information, etc.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
And don't feel smug because the bad guys are being caught. These are the tip of the iceberg. Like any crime, the vast majority get away with it. Welcome to the "pro-business" world. By the way, if so called "tort reform" goes through you will have severely reduced ability to sue. Enron was sued in the mid 90s, but the Gingrich Republicans passed a law that made the suit impossible. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and the case was thrown out. If they had been taken to court, it is a least possible that they would have been deterred from their later excesses. (Note: the bill was passed over the veto of then President Clinton.)
Bush just signed an executive order that gives oil companies complete immunity from lawsuits and criminal prosecution for all activities pertaining to Iraqi oil. Not just in Iraq. Anywhere U.S. law applies. The actual language is "any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment or other judicial process is prohibited and shall be deemed null and void..." It helps to have friends in high places, espically if you plan to steal...